Amber fossils reveal how ancient Australian landmass helped seed Southeast Asia's tropical forests
A landmass that broke away from northwestern Australia about 150 million years ago and drifted north for the next 100 million years helped lay the foundations for Southeast Asia's extraordinarily diverse tropical forests, new research has revealed.
About 150 million years ago, a landmass that broke away from northwestern Australia began drifting northward for the next 100 million years. New research, based on an international study of over 3,000 amber fossil specimens from Myanmar, suggests this ancient landmass played a crucial role in laying the foundations for Southeast Asia's diverse tropical forests.
The fossil records, dated to around 99 million years ago, reveal a thriving plant community that includes at least 392 types of flowering plants, ferns, conifers, and other ancient plant groups. This discovery, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, offers a unique glimpse into the evolutionary roots of Southeast Asia's modern tropical forests.
Professor Byron Lamont from Curtin University emphasizes that the West Burma Block, which eventually collided with Southeast Asia about 50 million years ago, carried a tropical flora that had evolved in isolation near the equator for tens of millions of years. The exceptional preservation of these fossils in exceptional three-dimensional detail provides evidence of a flourishing tropical plant community during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.
The findings challenge the notion that Southeast Asia's diverse flowering-plant ecosystems largely originated more recently, showing that flowering plants had already diversified extensively in equatorial environments during the Cretaceous period.
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