Digital Amber Catalogue

General Information

Amber fossils provide a unique window into ancient ecosystems, offering insights into extinct organisms through remarkable preservation of both external and internal structures: fossilised specimens are preserved 3-dimensionally, they allow us to study surface structures of the animals such as hairs, scales or flower structures which are in the rarest case preserved in other forms of fossils, and they occasionally conserve internal soft tissues which allows the complete or partial reconstruction of the inner anatomy of the studied fossil organism. AMBCAT aims to centralise and make accessible high-resolution digital scans of these rare fossils, fostering collaboration among researchers and advancing scientific research on a global scale.
By digitising and cataloguing over 1,500 amber fossils, AMBCAT promotes interdisciplinary research and public engagement, enabling the use of fossil data in fields ranging from climate, ecosystem and biodiversity change, to evolutionary and phylogenetic research. Since amber fossils have fascinated the public ever since, results from amber studies may be used to make concepts of paleoecosystem and climate research accessible to non-scientists. AMBCAT also serves as a bridge between scientific inquiry and public education, offering opportunities for exhibitions, educational resources, and media content that bring paleoscience to life.
AMBCAT will result in building and strengthening collaboration networks in Europe- and worldwide and lead to synergies, avoiding that a same sample is loaned or scanned/analysed several times by different research groups, and contributing to a usage of scan data for different purposes.

EU-Programme Acronym and Subprogramme Area	OCSARS Open Call
Project Type	Research and Innovation Action (RI)
Contract Number	Grant Agreement 101129751
Co-ordinator	Hereon (DE)

Funding for the Project (€)	Funding for Hereon (€)
249,900	130,000

Contact Person at Hereon

Dr. Jörg Hammel, Materials Physics, X-Ray Imaging with Synchrotron Radiation (WPI), Phone +49 4152 87 1047 E-mail contact

Participants

Barcelona Botanical Institute (ES), Biocenter – Faculty of Biology - Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München (DE), CERIC-ERIC (IT), CESSDA ERIC (NO), CLARIN ERIC (NL), CNRS (FR), DESY Stifung Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DE), Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, DARIAH+EU (FR), E-Science European Infrastructure For Biodiversity And Ecosystem Research (ES), EATRIS – European infrastructure for translational medicine (NL), Estación Biológica de Doñana-CSIC (ES), European Molecular Biology Laboratory (DE), European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CH), European Research Infrastructure on Highly Pathagenic Agents (BE), European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (FR), Finnish Meteorological Institute (FI), Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH (DE), Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung an der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin - Museum für Naturkunde (DE), Leibniz-Institut zur Analyse des Biodiversitätswandels MuseumKoenig Bonn (DE), Leibniz-Institut zur Analyse des Biodiversitätswandels- Museum der Natur Hamburg - Zoologie (DE), Oxford University Museum of Natural History (UK), Phyletisches Museum - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (DE), Senckenberg Institut & Naturmuseum Frankfurt (DE), TRUST-IT SRL (IT)

Last Update: 23. June 2025