Germs Found Trapped in Amber Lived With First Dinosaurs Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News December 13, 2006 Scientists have discovered a "microworld" of 220-million-year-old life trapped in tiny drops of ancient amber. The fossilized plant resin preserved bacteria, fungi, algae, and microscopic animals known as protozoans some 220 million years ago—the era when the very first dinosaurs began to appear. Surprisingly, these microscopic organisms look quite familiar to today's scientists. Alexander Schmidt and colleagues from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, report that the microbes have undergone few or no physical changes since the Triassic period—from 245 million to...