中国科学院南京地质古生物研究所机构知识库

The palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of central Tibet is key to understanding the uplift history of the Tibetan Plateau, which had a profound influence on Cenozoic global climate and biotic change. Here we report an amber layer from the lower part of the Dingqing Formation (late Oligocene) in Lunpola of central Tibet, which is the first record of amber from Tibet. Herein we find that Lunpola amber is derived from dipterocarp trees, as determined by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which are restricted to and dominant in Asian rainforest nowadays. This amber forest represents the northernmost dipterocarp forest and is consistent with the hypothesis of out-of-India dispersal of Asian dipterocarps. The Lunpola amber most probably was derived from the lower part of the Niubao Formation (early-middle Eocene) and suggests a tropical/subtropical wet forest was present in central Tibet at least before the late Oligocene (probably early-middle Eocene). (C) 2018 Elsevier Ireland Ltd Elsevier B.V. and Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, CAS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.