Mexican Amber

Mexican amber
Age (Ma)
Start:	23
End:	16
System/Period:	Neogene
Series/Epoch:	Miocene
Location
Location:	Chiapas
Country:	Mexico
Coordinates:	16.3°N, 92.4°W
Diversity
Genera:	8
Species:	14

The following overview of Mexican amber is provided by Varela-Hernández et al. (2024), as part of their description of Elektroformica.

The fossil inclusion originates from the Los Pocitos mine in Simojovel, Chiapas, Southwestern Mexico. Simojovel represents one of the main amber locations of an exceptional fossil conservation site recognized explicitly as Chiapas Amber-Lagerstätte (Riquelme et al., 2024). This Lagerstätte consists of three main sites: Simojovel (Late Oligocene), Totolapa (Early Miocene), and Estrella de Belén (Late Oligocene). The mines in the Simojovel area extract most of the amber for commercial use in jewellery and crafts. The mineralogical name for this amber is Simojovelite (Riquelme et al., 2014).

The Simojovel amber deposits are part of the upper section of the Simojovel Formation, which dates to approximately 24 million years old, in the Late Oligocene. This dating was calculated through a recent radiometric technique employing LA-ICP-MS zircon U–Pb geochronology (Riquelme et al., 2024). Estimates based on biostratigraphic correlations suggest that other amber deposits in the Simojovel area are from the Late Oligocene to the Early Miocene (Allison, 1967; Frost & Langenheim, 1974). Another subsequent estimation also based on biostratigraphy, states that the deposits in the area where the Los Pocitos mine is located are from the Early Miocene and are part of the uncorrelated strata of the Mazantic Shale (Perrilliat et al., 2010).

The Simojovel Formation (sensu, González-Alvarado, 1963) also known as the La Quinta Formation (Allison, 1967; Frost & Langenheim, 1974), is primarily composed of limestones, siltstones, shales, fine-grained fossiliferous sandstones, lignite sediments, abundant iron oxides, and few pyrite nodules (Riquelme et al., 2024). It is suggested that the upper strata that contain amber in the Simojovel Formation were deposited in environments that alternated between shallow platforms and transitional coastal conditions, characterized by predominant estuarine influences (Allison, 1967; Frost & Langenheim, 1974; Graham, 1999; Perrilliat et al., 2010; Riquelme et al., 2024).

Genera known from Mexican amber

Species known from Mexican amber

Location of Formation

References

Varela-Hernández, F., Riquelme, F., Estrada-Ruiz, E. 2024. Elektroformica azquil gen. et sp. nov., a new formicine ant from Oligo-Miocene Mexican amber. Palaeoentomology 7(5), 684-692 (doi:10.11646/palaeoentomology.7.5.11).