Thread: Ancient Pollen

Read an article about some prehistoric beetle found encased in amber. Along with the insect, scientists found 62 grains of pollen. I don’t know if they can actually do this but is it possible to remove individual pollen grains from amber without damaging them? If so how?

Also….I’m not sure how long pollen can survive and even though I think a grain of pollen is a living thing, I noticed searching Google that there are some folks who don’t think it is alive. Regardless I can’t see pollen surviving millions of years in a rock but has pollen been successfully extracted if only to verify live or dead? Or do they use thin slices of the amber that contains the grain to observe under microscope?

Originally Posted by zinjanthropos

Read an article about some prehistoric beetle found encased in amber. Along with the insect, scientists found 62 grains of pollen. I don’t know if they can actually do this but is it possible to remove individual pollen grains from amber without damaging them? If so how?

Also….I’m not sure how long pollen can survive and even though I think a grain of pollen is a living thing, I noticed searching Google that there are some folks who don’t think it is alive. Regardless I can’t see pollen surviving millions of years in a rock but has pollen been successfully extracted if only to verify live or dead? Or do they use thin slices of the amber that contains the grain to observe under microscope?

Pollen is considered to be alive as it contains vegetative cells other than just the male gametes. But lacking the female end of things, it cannot become a plant since it is not complete, as you probably know.

There is not much to be found on extracting pollen from amber. But did find one article from a French Journal which has the abstract in English, which gives some idea about what has been accomplished*.

Anything from amber is very old, and has been subjected to background radiation for long periods of time. It is unlikely that anything would still be alive after all that time. It might be possible however to recover some DNA fragments from various samples. It would seem that some will try.


"Pollen extraction from amber (Sparnacian of Le Quesnoy, Paris Basin): towards a new speciality in palaeo-palynology."

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...269?via%3Dihub

From link:

. An extraction method has been devised in order to observe it under light and scanning electron microscopes. This method consists of a partial dissolution of the amber by organic solvents, which softens it and enables dissection of the fragments.

Ah….I wondered how they did that. Also read where they heat the amber to soften it but wasn’t sure if that method damaged the grains.

Not expecting millions of years old pollen to still be alive. They would need the female plant anyways … I think. Thanks for the link