Level 1 - Absolute Beginner

Goethe was a famous German writer. He lived about 200 years ago. He loved collecting things from nature. He collected pieces of amber.

Amber is a natural material. It comes from old tree resin. It is usually yellow or orange. Sometimes insects get stuck inside it.

Scientists looked at Goethe's amber. They found a very old ant inside. The ant is 40 million years old. The ant is perfectly saved.

Scientists used a special machine to look inside the amber. The machine is like an X-ray. It can see inside things without breaking them. This is a wonderful discovery.

amber

a hard, yellow-orange material formed from ancient tree resin, sometimes containing trapped insects

resin

a sticky liquid that comes out of trees and can harden over time

fossil

the preserved remains of a living thing from a very long time ago

preserved

kept in its original condition and not allowed to decay

collect

to gather items of interest together over time

X-ray

a type of radiation used to create images of the inside of objects or bodies

ancient

very old, from millions or thousands of years ago

discovery

finding something new or unknown for the first time

Level 2 - Elementary

Researchers from the University of Jena in Germany made an extraordinary discovery inside a piece of Baltic amber from the personal collection of the famous poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe lived from 1749 to 1832 and was not only a great writer, but also a passionate amateur scientist who loved collecting natural objects including minerals, rocks, and amber.

The scientists found three insects trapped inside the amber: a fungus gnat, a black fly, and an ancient ant. The amber is approximately 40 million years old, meaning the insects became trapped in tree resin during the Eocene epoch. All three were remarkably well preserved, but the ant was in especially extraordinary condition.

To study the insects without damaging the precious amber, the researchers used a powerful technique called synchrotron micro computed tomography, or synchrotron micro-CT. This is similar to a medical CT scan but far more powerful. The equipment is located at the German Electron Synchrotron, known as DESY, in Hamburg. It uses intense X-ray beams to create detailed 3D images of structures inside objects.

The synchrotron scans revealed not only the ant's outer features in high resolution but also internal structures inside its body, including organs, that could not be seen with the naked eye. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports in June 2026. Scientists believe the ant likely built large nests in trees, which would explain how it came to be trapped in tree resin in the first place.

Eocene epoch

a period of geological time from about 56 to 34 million years ago

synchrotron

a large machine that accelerates particles to produce powerful X-ray beams for scientific research

computed tomography (CT)

a scanning technique that uses X-rays to create detailed 3D images of the inside of an object

amateur

a person who pursues an activity for personal enjoyment rather than as a profession

resin

a sticky, thick liquid produced by some trees that can harden over millions of years into amber

resolution

the level of fine detail visible in an image

extraordinary

very unusual, remarkable, or exceptional

epoch

a distinct period of time in history or geology

Level 3 - Intermediate

A study published in Scientific Reports in June 2026 has revealed a remarkable archaeological and entomological discovery: three insects, including a superbly preserved ant estimated at 40 million years old, were found inside a piece of Baltic amber from the private collection of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, now held at the Goethe National Museum managed by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Goethe, who lived from 1749 to 1832, is best known as the author of Faust, but he was also a dedicated naturalist who collected 40 pieces of Baltic amber during his lifetime.

The research team from the University of Jena employed synchrotron micro computed tomography at the German Electron Synchrotron facility, DESY, in Hamburg to image the insects in extraordinary three-dimensional detail without any physical disturbance to the amber. The three organisms identified were a fungus gnat, a black fly, and the ancient ant. Baltic amber is formed from the hardened resin of coniferous trees that grew across northern Europe during the Eocene epoch, approximately 56 to 34 million years ago, and is renowned as one of the world's richest sources of fossil insects from that period.

The synchrotron scans produced images of the ant at a resolution sufficient to reveal not only its external morphology, the surface features that taxonomists use to classify insects, but also internal structures including musculature and organ remnants that would otherwise be invisible. This level of detail is exceptional even by the standards of amber palaeontology, where preservation quality varies enormously. The external features visible in the scan are consistent with an ant species that constructed arboreal nests, meaning colonies built among tree branches, which would explain how the individual came into contact with the resin flow that ultimately entombed it.

The discovery carries a pleasing historical irony: Goethe assembled his amber collection as an expression of his scientific curiosity, yet he could not have known that one of his 40 pieces contained a perfect biological time capsule from deep geological time. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar, which now curates the collection, has indicated that the remaining pieces will be re-examined using similar imaging techniques, raising the prospect of further discoveries within one of Europe's most historically significant private natural history collections.

entomological

relating to the scientific study of insects

naturalist

a person who studies plants, animals, and the natural world

morphology

the study of the physical form and structure of an organism

arboreal

living in or adapted to life in trees

palaeontology

the scientific study of fossils and ancient life forms

coniferous

describing trees that produce cones, such as pine, spruce, and fir

Level 4 - Advanced

A paper published in Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio) in June 2026 by researchers at the University of Jena has brought new attention to Goethe's scientific legacy by extracting a palaeontological dividend from a portion of the amber collection he assembled during his lifetime. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the polymath whose literary and scientific careers ran in parallel, held an abiding interest in natural history that extended well beyond his better-known contributions to morphology, the term he coined for comparative anatomy. His collection of 40 pieces of Baltic amber, now conserved at the Goethe National Museum under the stewardship of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, contains material produced by the resin flows of Eocene coniferous forests approximately 34 to 56 million years ago.

The Jena team, working at the synchrotron beamline facilities of the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, applied synchrotron micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) to a single amber piece and identified three insect inclusions: a fungus gnat, a black fly, and a remarkably intact ant. Synchrotron micro-CT exploits the coherence and intensity of synchrotron X-ray beams, which exceed the output of conventional laboratory X-ray tubes by many orders of magnitude, to achieve sub-micron voxel resolution in three-dimensional reconstructions of embedded specimens without any physical intervention. The technique has increasingly displaced traditional destructive preparation methods in amber palaeontology, where the irreversibility of physical sectioning imposes an ethical obligation to exhaust non-invasive alternatives first.

The ant specimen is of particular interest because of the volumetric fidelity with which its internal anatomy has been reconstructed. Beyond the cuticular exoskeleton and appendage morphology conventionally accessible in amber inclusions, the synchrotron data yielded resolved images of muscle fibre bundles, portions of the alimentary canal, and tracheal network ramifications - soft-tissue proxies that are rarely preserved in forms available to conventional light microscopy. Phylogenetic placement from the external morphology alone proved consistent with a clade associated with arboreal nest construction, providing a coherent ecological narrative for how the individual encountered the resin substrate.

The broader implications extend beyond this particular specimen. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar's announcement that the remaining 39 amber pieces will undergo equivalent imaging raises the prospect of systematic palaeobiological profiling of a collection assembled by one of early modern Europe's most celebrated amateur naturalists. Goethe coined the term 'morphology' in 1790 and pursued a career-long project of understanding biological form that ran counter to the mechanistic natural philosophy then ascendant in Germany. There is a historical irony of considerable richness in the possibility that the amber he collected precisely as objects of contemplative natural beauty may now yield data legible only through technologies operating at energy scales and spatial resolutions that would have been inconceivable to him: an eighteenth-century collector's cabinet that turns out to contain, in suspended molecular detail, representatives of a world tens of millions of years beyond the reach of his imagination.