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/ Technology News / 2008 / January 2008 / January 5, 2008 France may have been an Amazon type jungle 55 million years ago |
Stem cell heart surgery may spell the end for transplantation
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A new analysis of amber fossils collected in France by biologists has led to the speculation that the country might once have been a Amazon-like jungle.
Washington, Jan 5 : A new analysis of amber fossils collected in France by biologists has led to the speculation that the country might once have been a Amazon-like jungle.
According to a report in Live Science, the 55-milllion-year-old pieces of amber (fossilized tree sap) were found near the Oise River in northern France.
The researchers stated that the amber likely dripped from a similar tree that once covered France millions of years before the continents drifted into their current positions.
What led the researchers to theorize that France was once an Amazon-like dense tropical rainforest, is the discovery of a new organic compund in amber called "quesnoin".
Because the precursor of this organic compound exists only in sap produced by a tree currently growing only in Brazil's Amazon rainforest, scientists came up with the obvious assumption.
"The region corresponding to modern France could have been found in a geographically critical marshy zone belonging to Africa and a tropical zone 55 million years ago extending through North Africa to the Amazon," explained the authors.
This new study has been detailed in the current issue of The Journal of Organic Chemistry.
ANI
