France used to be a tropical forest

In what is now Champs Elysee boulevard, the Eiffel Tower and neighboring vineyards, there used to be a dense forest like Amazon.

A new analysis of the amber fossil samples collected in France has shown that the country was once covered with dense tropical forests. The 55 million-year-old pieces of amber (fossil tree resin) are found near the Oise river in northern France. The trees that produced this amber have long since disappeared.

In a recent study, scientists found a new organic compound in the upper pieces of amber, known as " quesnoin ", which only exists in the resin of an existing plant in the Amazon, Brazil rain forest. . Accordingly, the team believes that these amber pieces have been released from a plant similar to those in the Amazon, but live in France millions of years before the continent drifted to its place today.

"The corresponding land is that France today may have been in a swamp of Africa and a tropical region that 55 million years ago stretches from North Africa to Amazon," the authors write.

Oise amber and insect carcasses in this amber.
(Photo: American Chemical Society)

T. An