The 68th PalAss Annual Meeting, hosted by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg, featured fieldtrips, workshops, symposium, oral presentations and poster presentations. The programme details can be found here. Laur Kiik, Leni Charbonneau, and Yayi Zheng from the AMBER team presented a poster at the conference. Through the poster, they interacted with fellow participants, explaining the AMBER project and its anthropological approaches while learning about their paleontological research, and in particular how they study amber and amber inclusions to explore ancient life-forms and ecologies.
While in Germany, Laur, Leni, and Yayi also visited Dr. Eva-Maria Sadowski and her amber lab in Berlin. Dr. Sadowski specialises in the evolution of seed plants and primarily focuses on inclusions in amber. Generously giving her time, she explained her work to the team, shared insights about current research on botanical inclusions in amber, and gave them a tour of the labs where amber is polished, prepared, and examined.
The museum curator, Dr. Christian Neumann, also showed the team the museum’s amber collections. They had the opportunity to see various amber inclusions and learned about the museum’s purchase policies in this area. The following day, they attended the PhD defence of Simon Beurel (now Dr. Beurel!), whose doctoral research focused on past East Asian amber forests.