PhD: Plant resins through time

The diversity of plant resin defenses is fascinating as resins can be preserved as ambers in the fossil record, providing a view of their evolutionary history. The environment and source plants for the massive, diverse Baltic amber deposit, and many other deposits, remain controversial. Preserved resinous plants and ambers will be investigated from fossil collections. The woods have in situ preserved ambers, so we should be able to directly link an amber type to its source plant and compare this to fossil and modern floras and resins.

This project will provide training in fossil and amber preparation and conservation, plant anatomy and morphology, taxonomy, evolution; and chemical analyses (e.g. FTIR, GC-MS) of the in situ and other ambers.