Synonyms
Fossil resin; Resinite
Definition
Fossilized plant resin from various botanical sources.
Introduction
Amber is a fossilized plant resin from various botanical sources and of different geological ages, ranging from the Carboniferous to the Pliocene, although it is particularly frequent in the Cretaceous and in the Eocene to Miocene. The term “amber” is used most commonly as a synonym for fossil resin of every provenance, geological, and palaeobotanical source. A more reductive meaning of amber has been considered, referring only to succinite , the mineralogical species occurring in the Baltic coast deposits and neighboring localities containing significant amounts of succinic acid (up to 8%). However, most commonly, amber and fossil resin are the terms used interchangeably for indicating macroscopic material (Anderson and Crelling, 1995; Langenheim, 2003). Another term used by coal geologists for fossil resins is resinite,which is a microscopic material often found in coal...
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Ragazzi, E., Schmidt, A.R. (2011). Amber. In: Reitner, J., Thiel, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geobiology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9212-1_9
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