Amber From the Dominican Republic: Analysis by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

Abstract

The carbon‐13 NMR spectra of amber from several mining sites in the Dominican Republic show considerable variation. In certain cases the differences are sufficiently distinct to serve as a reliable indicator of provenance. The gradations within the resonances of unsaturated carbons may reflect the relative ages of the samples, because fossilization and diagenesis can remove this functionality.

Caribbean biogeography: molecular evidence for dispersal in West Indian terrestrial vertebrates.

“…(ii) The fossil record of vertebrate groups recorded in mainland strata suggests that those groups with members found today in the West Indies could not have participated in the late Cretaceous vicariant event because they had not yet evolved (47). A weakness in this argument is that the Dominican amber fossils of vertebrates now have been dated to Upper Eocene (9,48), which is older than predicted by mainland fossil evidence (although still 30-35 million years younger than the hypothesized late Cretaceous proto-Antilles). Our molecular data, involving direct comparisons of extant West Indian and mainland groups, now provide a comprehensive body of evidence implicating dispersal as the primary mechanism for the origin of the West Indian biota.…”

The First Cretaceous Spider Wasp (Hymenoptera: Pompilidae)

“…Amber from the northern region of Dominican Republic has been found to be from 40 to 26 Ma (Lambert et al 1985), but IturraldeVinent and MacPhee (1996) argue that all Dominican amber should be dated to the same age as the deposits bearing it, because evidence suggests that the fragments have not been emplaced by re-deposition. Therefore, Iturralde-Vinent and MacPhee (1996) proposed an age of 20-15 Ma for all Dominican amber, based on biostratigraphic and palaeogeographic data from Hispaniola.…”

Assignment of vibrational spectra of labdatriene derivatives and ambers: A combined experimental and density functional theoretical study

“…2,3,4 Maturation over the years induce further crosslinking, isomerization and cyclization reactions among others. Because amber is mostly an insoluble polymer of high molecular weight, chemical characterization of its components has relied in techniques such as solid-state FT-IR 7,8 and NMR [9][10][11] . Infrared spectroscopy is a rapid and reliable method to identify and characterize fossil resins.…”