Paleontologist Dany Azar holds up a treasure he found in a piece of early Cretaceous amber in Lebanon: the oldest mosquito ever found.
Ali Daniel/NPR
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It’s a sunny morning in the village of Ain Dara in central Lebanon. A two-lane road cuts through hilly, rugged countryside.
Danny Azar walked about a hundred feet along the road, then stopped on a rock ledge to ascend the embankment.
In part, paleontologists choose wild sites like this—close to roads, close to civilization—to avoid having to walk long distances.
“I’m a little lazy,” he said with a smile.
But there’s another reason: Such access also cuts through the hillside, making it accessible at all levels.
“Let’s see,” Azar said, climbing onto the ledge. After walking a few steps, he stepped onto the slope and climbed up the steep and fragile mountain wall. The air was cool and the cloudless sky was a deep blue.
In 2023, Azar searched for amber along the rock face of the Hadath el Joubbeh area.
Sibela Maqsoud/Dani Azar
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Sibela Maqsoud/Dani Azar
Azar, who holds joint appointments at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China and the Lebanese University, stared at the dirt and rocks before him. It didn’t seem like much – but he knew what he was after.
Soon, Azar stopped. Among the soil and stones under his feet, he found a piece of amber not much larger than a grain of rice. Then he found another and another – shiny golden shards gleaming in the sunlight.
“This is one of 450 amber outcrops I’ve found in this country,” said Azar, who is from Lebanon.
He explains that Lebanon is one of the few places where key moments in Earth’s evolutionary history can be studied. During the Early Cretaceous Period, about 130 million years ago, dinosaurs still dominated and the world was transitioning from the dominance of ferns and conifers to that of flowering plants. This transformation—one that will transform life on Earth as we know it—is sealed in a treasure trove of ancient specimens that can be found on the rocky slopes that Azar is so familiar with.
Before Adjara, researchers knew of only one amber outcrop in the south. But he found fossilized resin almost everywhere he went – near the country’s famous cedars, in the mountains and even along the Beirut River outside the capital.
“They called me ‘The Amber Man,'” he said.
Danny Azar holds a large amber specimen discovered in the Wadi Jezzine area in 2015.
Simon Haddad/Courtesy of Danny Hazard
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Simon Haddad/Courtesy of Danny Hazard
Azar now lives in China, but he returns to Lebanon several times a year for field trips because the amber here is so special. It documents the dawn of the age of flowering plants—an ecological shift that forever changed life on Earth.
another time, another earth
If time travelers were to visit the early Cretaceous, they would find a very strange Earth, and far more dangerous.
“There were dinosaurs and swarms of insects,” Azar said. “I don’t think I could stand in this environment for a minute because it could be very dangerous. It was a tropical climate and the forest was very humid, dense and dark.
That forest of ferns and conifers is about to be overrun by flowering plants. It was the arrival of flowers that transformed the earth into the planet we now live on. During this period, new plant families containing pollen and nectar emerged in abundance, serving as a buffet for the legions of insects to eat them as they evolved and diversified over the next millennia.
“Everything is changing,” Azar said. “A lot of colonies appeared during this period – bees and other pollinators. Even the beginning of butterflies [and moths]”. These plants provided food and new habitat for insects, which began to pollinate many plants—so these two types of organisms evolved at the same time.
That’s why Cretaceous amber is like a series of snapshots of a planetary transition, the period between two worlds.
golden window to the past
Not all the amber fragments at this outcrop of Ain Dara are small. Sibelle Maksoud, a geologist at Lebanese University and Azhar’s wife, also went out to collect today. She also found a piece of amber the size of a golf ball.
Paleoentomologist Marina Hakim (left), geologist Sibel Maqsoud and paleontologist Danny Azar recently searched for ancient amber inclusions on a slope in central Lebanon.
Ali Daniel/NPR
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“This is a treasure,” she said, holding the Golden Globe. “Imagine you’re the first person in 130 million years to touch this resin. So it’s a nice feeling. Afterwards, we can clean it a little bit and check under a microscope to see if we can see any insects in it.
These treasures are the product of sticky resin that exuded from trees during the Cretaceous period, and occasionally buried insects or bits of plant material, were buried and, over time, under the right conditions, turned into amber.
“It’s amazing because it’s so well preserved,” Azar said. “This piece of amber is a window into the past.”
Geologist Sibelle Maksoud holds up a golf ball-sized piece of amber. “It’s a treasure,” she said.
Ali Daniel/NPR
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Azar gazed at this window again and again, studying countless amber spheres collected from across Lebanon. This allowed him to reconstruct the drama that was playing out on Earth during the early Cretaceous—how flowering plants came to dominate, and how insects contributed to the coup.
For example, Azar recently discovered a special species of mosquito in a piece of 130-million-year-old amber. It is the oldest one ever found, just a mile from where he and Maqsud stand today at Ain Dara. “And,” he said, “it was a male with very powerful mouthparts for sucking blood.”
Today, there are no blood-sucking male mosquitoes. This familiar and annoying bite is caused by pregnant women and can promote the spread of deadly diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. Azar says that’s because once flowers appeared in the early Cretaceous, male mosquitoes may have changed their diet, evolving away from blood to feeding on a different, safer food source: nectar.
And this is just one of many treasures. Azar had a backlog of more than 500 pounds of amber blocks he had collected over the years. He has published extensively on discoveries of ancient flowers, dinosaur tracks and new insect species that Azar says will rewrite textbooks.
Once the amber fragments are cleaned, they will sparkle.
Ali Daniel/NPR
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Ali Daniel/NPR
A few hours later, Azhar, Maqsoud and a colleague bagged a pound or two of amber.
“If we went to any outcrop elsewhere in the world,” Azar said, “you might spend an entire day just to find two or three of these fragments.”
an underrated gift
Azar cherishes Lebanon’s paleontological wealth.
“It’s amazing when you see all these discoveries in such a small country,” he said. “This is a gift. This is a gift.
There’s just one problem. Azar was unable to get most of the rest of Lebanon to care about these treasures.
“In China, they [would] Build a museum there,” he said. “And in Europe, they [would] Protect the land because they care. Here I have been fighting for 20 years to get a natural history museum.
Azar said he received nothing but bad checks. To him, these amber outcrops were wasted heirlooms in a land racked by conflict and corruption.
“Ever since I was born in this country,” he lamented, “there’s always been trouble.
Azar has seen people build construction projects on the outcrops he discovered, but enforcement of zoning regulations has been minimal. Lebanon’s financial crisis prompted him to move to China, where he spent much of the year away from his family. And this time, he didn’t dare to risk going south to collect amber samples.
“It’s too dangerous,” he explained. “Unfortunately, bombings happen every day in southern Lebanon. Why can’t we live in peace and normalcy for a few years?
Still, Azar believed — and hoped — that the museum he longed for could one day be built to house his bounty.
Azar’s collection also includes insects, including these beetles and butterflies.
Ali Daniel/NPR
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He doesn’t yet know that today’s shipment of gold balls will yield a slew of Cretaceous insects, including a spider, a handful of midges and a male lacewing that may have never been seen before. This is a new species encased in amber, buried in the dirt on the side of the road… waiting to be plucked from a place with a deep and complex history.
