YOU have to remind yourself that you are looking at an animal that lived alongside dinosaurs. In my hand is a piece of amber. I hold it up to the window to get a better view of the tiny corpse inside: a spider, legs splayed out behind its body. It looks like it died yesterday. But it has been mummified for almost 100 million years.
Under the watchful eye of curator , I pick up another piece of reddish, translucent amber. It is stuffed full of insects. She tells me it is one of seven slices of the most fossil-rich piece of amber ever found: a fist-sized nodule containing 454 different species.
I am at the for a behind the scenes look at some Burmese amber. Until recently, this cache –117 pieces, collected when Burma, now known as Myanmar, was part of the British Empire – was the only research collection in the world. But in the past decade or so, scientific interest has exploded. Burmese amber is one of the world’s hottest palaeontological treasures, crammed with fossils from a crucial – and hitherto quite opaque – time window. It has yielded invertebrates, plants, flowers, mushrooms, birds, snakes, frogs and even dinosaurs.
Advertisement
“I came to marvel at exquisite amber. I left with a tale of destruction, hatred and bloodshed”
“It’s an entire tropical ecosystem,” says Ed Jarzembowski, an amber expert at the , who happened to be visiting the museum that day. But he also tells me it is now a war zone. I came here to marvel at a palaeontological cornucopia. I left with a darker story of ethnic hatred, smuggling, environmental destruction, diabolical working conditions and bloodshed.
Burmese amber, or burmite, has been a prized gemstone for centuries. The entire world supply comes from Kachin, the northernmost state of Myanmar. The richest deposits of all are found in a remote jungle valley called Hukawng, which is Burmese for “the place of the devil”.
The name is apt. For most of the 70 years since Myanmar’s independence from the UK, Hukawng has been a no go area. The ethnic minority Kachin people have been struggling for independence since 1962. Right now, the situation is very intense. “You don’t go into Kachin. There’s a war on, and it’s getting hotter,” says Jarzembowski.
Amber starts out as resin, which oozes out of conifers and other tree species in response to injury or attack. Small animals often get trapped in the goo, along with feathers, leaves and fungi. Very occasionally, resin fossilises and becomes amber. When heated and compressed after being buried under sediment, the viscous and volatile gum polymerises and hardens into a substance resembling Perspex. Whatever was trapped fossilises too. “It shows you an ancient world in photographic detail,” says Mellish. “They don’t look any different to how they would have been in life.”
Fossils in amber, known as inclusions, are a window on long-lost ecosystems. Baltic amber, for example, dates back around 44 million years to a time when Europe was a subtropical archipelago. Found primarily around the Baltic Sea, this amber contains the most diverse fossil assemblage in the world, with more than 3000 species. These build and pine forest with lakes and rivers, abuzz with flying insects and crawling with geckos, spiders, mantises, termites, scorpions and stick insects.
Baltic amber is durable and transparent, and so ideal for scientific study. Other ambers are less so. On my visit to the museum, I saw samples from Mexico, the US, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Most looked like boring, brown pebbles.
Burmese amber, however, is glassy and translucent, making it another invaluable window on the past – albeit one that took a long time to open.
The amber first came to scientific attention in 1892 when Fritz Noetling, a German employee of the Geological Survey of India, was on the lookout for exploitable resources in British Burma. He noted that the amber was stuffed full of insects and other inclusions, and reckoned that it was about 40 million years old, roughly the same age as Baltic amber.
In comparison to Baltic amber, which can be easily mined in large quantities and frequently washes up on beaches, Burmese amber was in the middle of a hostile jungle. If Noetling had ambitions to exploit the deposit, they quickly waned.
A few years later, a local called R. C. J. Swinhoe started sending samples to entomologist Theodore Cockerell at the University of Colorado. Cockerell identified 38 new species of insect, three arachnids and a millipede, and reported that there were many more he couldn’t identify. “The fauna is very remarkable,” he wrote in a . Based on the fossils, he suggested that the amber was older than originally thought, possibly 100 million years old. If so, that would make it very interesting. In the early 20th century, the fossil record of insects from the late Cretaceous – between 100 to 66 million years ago – was all but non-existent. It was a frustrating gap given flowering plants were new on the scene and an evolutionary explosion was in full bloom.
In 1921, Swinhoe donated his collection to the British Museum. It was the only such collection in the world. But for some reason it got filed away and forgotten.
And then came Jurassic Park. The plot of the 1993 movie hinges on extracting dinosaur DNA from a 100-million-year-old mosquito preserved in amber. “On the back of that, the museum decided that we needed a palaeoentomologist to look at the collection,” says Mellish.
The go-to guy was of the Palaeontological Institute in Moscow. He visited London and quickly added to the roll call of species, identifying spiders, a scorpion, a snail and some reptile skin.
Around the same time, the Kachin Independence Organisation and its military wing, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), signed a peace treaty with the Myanmar government. Soon afterwards, the owner of a small Canadian mining company called Leeward Capital went to Kachin in search of riches, and ended up in the Hukawng valley.
“The research is hazy, if not totally silent, about exactly where the amber finds come from”
Amber was Leeward’s plan C, after plan A (gold) and plan B (platinum) failed to pan out. Plan C also went badly at first. The world market was flooded with Baltic amber, so the company sent samples to at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was reportedly “amazed” and bought 75 kilograms of raw amber. Chinese scientists soon got in on the act. The Burmese amber rush was on.
Over the next few years, interest ballooned. According to , the number of species described from Burmese amber has been growing exponentially. In 2000, there were 60. In 2018 alone, another 320 were added. At the last count, .
The deposit has also been dated using modern isotopic techniques, which place it at 98.8 million years old, plus or minus half a million years.
Most of the fossils are insects and other small bugs, but there are larger organisms too. Among the invertebrates are crabs, scorpions, cockroaches, armoured spiders, dragonflies, millipedes, a snail, a hairy cicada, a grasshopper and a mite wrapped in spider silk.
One piece contains a spider attacking a wasp, a rare example of fossilised behaviour. There are plants, including flowers in the act of releasing pollen. All are preserved exquisitely. There are also marine animals, including an ammonite and a shrimp, suggesting that the forest where the amber formed was by the sea.
Most thrilling of all are the vertebrates. Scraps of reptile skin and isolated feathers were already known from the Natural History Museum collection. But in the past two years, a breathtaking menagerie of animals has been discovered. In 2016, a team led by Grimaldi unveiled a collection of 12 lizards. A few weeks later, a rival group described two tiny wings from hatchling birds, which presumably tumbled out of their nests and got stuck in resin. Next came part of the tail of a small, feathered dinosaur, complete with skin, bones and plumage. The past year has seen a rush of vertebrate fossils: the hand of a gecko, two entire juvenile birds, four frogs and a snake. The fossils appear to have formed in a tropical forest on the coast dominated by redwood trees, which produce prolific amounts of resin.
Stuck in time
“At this moment, it’s the best glimpse we get of the middle of the Cretaceous,” says of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, Canada, who co-wrote the papers announcing the dinosaur and snake finds, among others. “There’s a gap in the fossils in sedimentary rock, and Burmese amber helps fill that gap. It helps us understand things like how flowering plants rose to dominance and how insects diversified alongside them.” But this understanding comes at a heavy price.
Spend any time delving into the Burmese amber literature and you soon hit a frustrating information fog. The papers are often hazy, if not totally silent, about exactly where the finds come from. The reason for this has a lot to do with the uncertain and often controversial provenance of the specimens.
Today, Burmese amber has a long and treacherous journey before ending up as gemstones or museum pieces. After being mined by hand in the Hukawng valley, it is laboriously transported out of the disputed territory to a bustling market on the outskirts of Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin (see “Map”). Most of the amber is bought by dealers from the neighbouring Chinese province, Yunnan. From there it is smuggled over the border to a bazaar in the city of Tengchong, which is a magnet for dealers from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Tengchong used to specialise in jade, but is increasingly dominated by amber. In 2017, the Chinese government named Tengchong the “city of amber”.
“What I learned in my research is that virtually all of the amber is imported into China without going through customs on either side,” says Alessandro Rippa of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who visited Tengchong and Myitkyina to do research on the amber trade.
żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs who have visited Tengchong are united in their awe. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Jarzembowski. “There’s stall after stall after stall of amber, and you know everything you’re looking at is an undescribed species.”
“It’s spectacular,” agrees McKellar, who visited last year. “I had no idea of the scope until seeing it in person. There are four or five streets of amber vendors, dozens and dozens of people selling it by the kilogram. It’s mind-blowing.” Many of the pieces are huge, the size of a human head, he says, suggesting that even more spectacular discoveries may be coming. “We don’t face the same size limitations that we do with other amber deposits. There’s the potential to get whole animals.”
Most of the amber is destined for gemstone markets, but some ends up in researchers’ hands. żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs don’t routinely scour the markets themselves, but know people who do. At any point along the pipeline from mine to market, savvy dealers will pull interesting-looking specimens to one side and offer them to potential buyers in the scientific world.
The linchpin of this operation is a palaeontologist called at the . In recent years, he has built up a network of amber dealers in Kachin and Yunnan who tip him off when something interesting crops up. “They will send photos, videos. The photos from all angles, with details. If I feel that there is scientific value, I would recommend museums to buy,” Xing told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ by email.
One of the best customers is the , a not-for-profit museum in Chaozhou, China. Since it was established in 2013, it has bought more than 150 important Burmese amber fossils, including the dinosaur tail, which it loans to scientists like McKellar. Dexu’s website says, tantalisingly, that “we also have other equally important but not yet published amber specimens”. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has also poured money into buying up Burmese amber, says Jarzembowski. His institute has 30,000 pieces.
McKellar, who is , says that it and similar institutes are doing a great service by ensuring that scientifically important specimens end up with researchers rather than “vanishing” into private collections. But he accepts that they often don’t know exactly where their fossils come from. “If you buy material, you’ve lost control over stratigraphy, or where the specimens are from in the geological record,” he says.
Very occasionally, however, scientists do know exactly. But finding out takes a lot of effort and bravery.
In the summer of 2015, Xing met a contact in the market in Myitkyina. This man showed Xing a piece of polished amber about the size and shape of a dried apricot, containing what appeared to be a plant stem. Xing examined it with his hand lens and realised it was something much more interesting: a section of vertebrate tail, compete with feathers. He bought the piece on behalf of Dexu, although won’t say how much for, and later showed it to McKellar. It turned out to be from a feathered dinosaur, probably a juvenile theropod (the same group to which T. rex belongs). “I was blown away. This is the sort of thing that we always hope to find,” McKellar .
Xing had previously tried and failed to get to the amber mines. Now he was even more determined. A few days later, he pulled off the seemingly impossible: smuggling himself from Myitkyina into the Hukawng valley.
The trip was arduous and risky. The 1994 ceasefire between the KIA and the Myanmar military – officially called the Tatmadaw – had collapsed in 2011, and hostilities had resumed. The mines were now under the control of the KIA, for whom gemstones are an important source of revenue. A transboundary road opened a few years ago, making it easy to get from China to Myitkyina. But crossing into KIA-held territory is a different story.
Travelling on forged identity papers and in disguise – he wore local clothing and smeared his face with a yellow pigment used by the Kachins as a sunblock and insect repellent – Xing and his contact drove for 7 hours on near-impassable roads, through numerous army checkpoints. When they ran out of road, they crossed a river on a wooden boat and then covered the final few kilometres by elephant.
According to Xing’s account, the “mine” turned out to be a shanty town of around 3000 tents, each covering a narrow mineshaft up to 10 metres deep. The miners were living in bamboo huts among the shafts. Xing described conditions in the mines as “very dangerous, inhuman”. The miners work with no safety equipment and often die of suffocation or in collapses. After 3 hours collecting amber and rock samples, he and his guide left and made the gruelling return journey.
While he was there, Xing said he met the dealers who had sold the dinosaur tail to his contact and was taken to the mineshaft it came from. He says he was thus able to confirm the precise origin of a Burmese amber fossil.
Xing also says he is satisfied that he obtained the specimen legally and that he exported it to China with a permit issued by the appropriate authority, the Myanmar Gems Enterprise. All of Dexu’s Burmese amber specimens are obtained legally, he says. żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ has tried to confirm this directly with Dexu, but hasn’t had a response.
Buying Burmese amber inevitably raises ethical issues. Since hostilities resumed in 2011, the amber mines of the Hukawng valley have been at the centre of an increasingly bloody resource war.
The Kachin Independence Organisation heavily relies on natural resources, mostly jade and gold but also amber, for its revenues. It also taxes those using the smuggling routes into China. As the territory’s de facto government, it uses the funds for schools, hospitals and infrastructure, says Hanna Hindstrom, a senior campaigner and Myanmar resources expert at NGO . The independence organisation doesn’t publish any figures about its revenues and spending, she says, but it undoubtedly also uses the money to buy weapons.
The Tatmadaw also craves control of the mines and smuggling routes, both to squeeze the Kachin Independence Organisation and to keep the spoils for itself. According to Global Witness and other NGOs, its generals have a long and ruthless history of making personal fortunes from jade and other natural resources. That is one reason why an equitable peace is so hard to broker.
Soon after the ceasefire was broken, the Tatmadaw was at it again. “The jade mining areas were attacked and controlled by the Burmese army from 2013 to 2015,” says Steven Tsa Ji, head of a coalition of civil society organisations called the . The KIA made up for the loss by expanding its amber operation, he says, but the Myanmar army came for those too.
Last year, the UN Human Rights Council sent an independent fact-finding mission to Kachin to document the conflict. Its . In June 2017, the Myanmar air force dropped leaflets onto the amber mines warning local people to leave the area within 10 days. It then launched a military offensive. For the next five months, the Tatmadaw subjected the villagers to an indiscriminate campaign of murder, torture, rape and arson. The offensive stopped during the rainy season, but resumed in January 2018 with an aerial bombardment supported by heavy artillery and ground troops.
The UN report says the Tatmadaw’s overall objective was to “destroy the KIA’s economy by appropriating amber and [other] mining resources under their control”. According to Tsa Ji, this mission succeeded.
The UN’s conclusions are damning: the military operations were illegal under international law and Myanmar’s commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, and his top military leaders should be investigated and prosecuted for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The amber mines are also a cesspit of human rights and environmental abuses. “Poor working conditions are pretty much a trademark in all the mines in Kachin state and environmental regulations, where they exist, are largely ignored,” says Hindstrom.
Amber is only part of the resource war, and scientists are far from the only people buying it. But it is impossible not to conclude that they are complicit, if not actively involved, in a trade that helps to fund a war. “I think the money coming in from China has fuelled the conflict indirectly,” says Jarzembowski. “We don’t know for certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s loads of money.”
Research costs
Dexu and other collectors don’t disclose how much they pay for specimens and scientists say they don’t know, although McKellar guesses a good vertebrate specimen would fetch “in the order of thousands of dollars”. Jarzembowski also reckons “thousands” and that the snake specimen was probably “very expensive”. The dealers are canny and play labs off against one another to inflate prices, he says, while the Chinese Academy of Sciences will pay whatever it takes to secure important specimens. According to unsourced estimates published in Canadian newspaper the , the dinosaur tail $100,000 and the legal amber trade is worth at least $1 billion a year.
I asked McKellar if he and his colleagues were aware of the conflict, and amber’s role in it. He paused and sighed: “To some extent. It’s a shame, but it’s sort of beyond our control. I don’t see us directly fuelling it. It has escalated over the past three or four years. A lot of the samples we are dealing with were collected before there were problems in the region.”
For now, the amber mines are under the control of the Tatmadaw, although Hindstrom and others predict that the KIA will try to wrest them back. A peace process aimed at ending all of Myanmar’s ethnic conflicts is under way, but the KIA has refused to participate.
Already this year, 79 scientific papers have been published on Burmese amber. The flow of specimens continues and rumours circulate of ever more spectacular fossils. Tengchong amber market is as busy as ever. One of the most prized stones on offer is a deep red colour, known locally as xuè pò. Translated into English, it means “blood amber”.
Hollywood tale
Could we really extract 100-million-year-old dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes preserved in Burmese amber, à la Jurassic Park? Sadly, almost certainly not. According to Claire Mellish of the Natural History Museum in London, insect fossils in amber are hollowed-out exoskeletons with the soft innards long decayed. Even if tissues survived, DNA wouldn’t. “The half-life of DNA is something like 500 years and we’re talking about specimens that are 99 million years old,” says Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, Canada.
Even if the storyline of Jurassic Park is fanciful, the film’s impact on palaeontology has been very real: after the movie’s success, institutions around the globe began taking a closer look at their amber collections and unearthing new finds.
Article amended on 20 May 2019
We corrected the amount of raw amber David Grimaldi bought
