Amber piece 1552.b showing bioinclusions. Arrow in a (top): inclusion of †Ctenobethylus goepperti; arrow in b (bottom): inclusion of the Sciaridae. Scale bar 5 mm.
Some years ago, while staying for a few days in Berlin in a hotel just off Goethestraße, I made the mistake of telling a taxi driver that our hotel was just off “Go-eth Straße”. It took several minutes and a map to sort out the confusion.
“Nein! Goethe-Straße!” he laughed. Only then did I realise that “Go-eth” and “Goethe” were not two different German philosophers.
“Ach ja! Danke! Goethe! Ich bin ein Engländer!” I explained, in my best German.
“Ja! Is better we speak English,” he replied.
Goethestraße — Goethe Street — is, of course, named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832), the German writer, poet, novelist and playwright. He was also an administrator, scientist, geologist, botanist and philosopher. As a naturalist and collector, he left behind an extensive geological and mineralogical collection, including 40 pieces of Baltic amber, which have now been closely examined by biologists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena — appropriately enough, since Goethe and the playwright Friedrich Schiller were friends.
What they found was the subject of a paper in Scientific Reports, published in January 2026. It is not good news for creationists, since it concerns an approximately 40-million-year-old ant, preserved in exquisite detail and now visible using modern imaging techniques such as synchrotron micro-computed tomography. In addition to the ant, the scientists also found a fungus gnat and a blackfly in Goethe’s amber.
It is unlikely that Goethe knew these creatures were preserved in his amber, since the pieces are unpolished and the contents are barely visible to the untrained eye. He certainly could not have known that the amber was tens of millions of years old. Had he known, we can only speculate how that knowledge might have affected his view of nature, time and human origins. His famous work, Faust, draws deeply on Christian motifs, including the story of a man who makes a pact with the Devil; but Goethe was also a serious observer of nature, living at a time when geology, palaeontology and evolutionary thinking were still in their infancy.
In the early nineteenth century, Europeans had not yet accumulated the overwhelming evidence that Earth is billions of years old and that life has changed profoundly over vast periods of time. Many educated people still interpreted history, nature and morality through a biblical framework, even when their own thinking was more subtle than simple literalism. Goethe, despite his scientific curiosity, lived before Darwin, before modern stratigraphy was fully established, and long before modern imaging could reveal the hidden contents of an opaque piece of amber.
Now, of course, we know better, because of the tremendous scientific progress made over the last two centuries.
Why Baltic amber? Amber is fossilised tree resin, not tree sap, and although it is found in many parts of the world, it has a special association with the Baltic because that region contains the largest and most famous amber deposits. Baltic amber is mostly a form called succinite, derived from resin produced by vast Eocene forests that once grew across northern Europe, especially in the region sometimes called Fennoscandia.How the biologists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena studied Goethe’s amber was the subject of a news item by Sebastian Hollstein, which accompanied the paper in Scientific Reports:
As resin flowed from damaged or diseased trees, it trapped small organisms such as insects, spiders, plant fragments and other forest debris. Over millions of years, the resin was buried, chemically altered and hardened into amber. Later erosion, rivers, marine currents and Ice Age glaciers redistributed it through sediments and along the coasts of the Baltic Sea. This is why pieces of amber can still be washed up on Baltic beaches after storms.
The richest geological concentrations are associated with Paleogene deposits around the south-eastern Baltic, particularly the Samland Peninsula and surrounding areas. Polish geological sources also note that major amber accumulations occur in sandy and silty sediments connected with the Eocene sea and ancient river-delta systems.
The Baltic connection is also cultural and historical. For thousands of years, Baltic amber was traded southwards into central and southern Europe along what became known as the Amber Routes. These were among Europe’s earliest long-distance trade networks, carrying amber from northern Europe towards the Mediterranean and Adriatic worlds.
So “Baltic amber” is not merely a modern trade label. It reflects a real geological concentration, an ancient Eocene forest ecosystem, coastal and glacial redistribution, and a prehistoric trade network that made amber from the Baltic famous throughout Europe.
Exceptionally Well-Preserved Ant in Goethe’s Amber
Researchers at the University of Jena examine the collection of the famous poet
Even some 200 years after his death, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s scientific curiosity continues to yield new insights. This has now been demonstrated by biologists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena while closely examining the amber collection of the Weimar poet and polymath. In one of the pieces, they discovered a fossilized ant approximately 40 million years old which, thanks to its excellent state of preservation and extensive analyses, provides valuable information about the insect species. The Jena researchers report their findings together with experts from the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar in the scientific journal »Scientific Reports«.
Goethe’s amber collection, housed by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar at the Goethe National Museum, comprises a total of 40 pieces originating from the Baltic region. In two of them, the Jena scientists discovered three fossil animal inclusions. The poet himself was likely unaware of the millions-of-years-old contents of these biological time capsules, as the animals are barely visible to the untrained eye in the unpolished stones. To identify them beyond doubt, the Jena team therefore employed modern imaging techniques. They scanned the promising amber pieces at the German Electron Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg using synchrotron micro-computed tomography, producing three-dimensional images of a fungus gnat, a black fly, and an ant.
A Look Inside the Ant
The ant in particular attracted great interest among the Jena researchers.
The ant belongs to the extinct species †Ctenobethylus goepperti (Mayr, 1868), which is very common in amber. Thanks to its excellent preservation and the extensive investigations, however, we were able to describe it in greater detail than ever before and gain new information about the species and its relationships.
Bernhard Bock, co-corresponding author
Institute for Zoology and Evolutionary Research
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Jena, Germany.
In addition to fine hairs on the body of the worker ant, the researchers were able for the first time to look inside it and visualize endoskeletal structures in the head and thorax, revealing more about ant morphology.
We have fully processed the specimen and, based on the newly acquired information, created a 3D reconstruction that is available online. This model helps colleagues worldwide to identify and compare further fossils of this species.
Daniel Tröger, co-author
Institute for Zoology and Evolutionary Research
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Jena, Germany.
Based on similarities to the ant genus Liometopum, which today lives in North America or warmer regions of Europe, conclusions can be drawn about the lifestyle of these extinct ants. The ant from Goethe’s amber presumably built large nests in trees, which could also explain why the species is so frequently found in amber.
Goethe and Amber
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself showed little interest in amber throughout his life—apart from its potential optical properties. For example, he ground lenses from the fossilized tree resin in order to observe specific color spectra for his theory of colors. Although systematic research into the material and the fossils it contains began in the mid-18th century, and early scientific publications can also be found in his library, the significance of these studies for his own fields of interest was not yet foreseeable.
Goethe is regarded as the founder of morphology and would likely have been delighted to see how we were able to gain valuable insights in this field using entirely new methods. At the same time, the results demonstrate the value of such historical collections. It is truly fascinating that an object originating from his hand and his era—when this science was just beginning—can still enrich us so much today.
Bernhard Bock.
3D reconstruction of the ant and the fossil in the original amber behind it.Picture: Bernhard Bock/Daniel Tröger
Publication:
There is a pleasing irony in the fact that these tiny creatures, sealed in resin millions of years before any human being existed, lay unnoticed in Goethe’s own collection. Goethe, with all his curiosity about nature, lived at the edge of a great intellectual transformation, but before the discoveries that would make deep time, extinction, common descent and evolution unavoidable facts of science.
In Goethe’s day, the natural world could still be interpreted within a biblical framework, with Earth imagined as young and essentially unchanged since creation. Since then, geology has revealed the immense age of the planet; palaeontology has revealed the succession of life through time; and biology has revealed the evolutionary processes that explain both continuity and change. A piece of amber that might once have been admired merely as a beautiful curiosity can now be read as a tiny window into an Eocene forest ecosystem.
The ant, fungus gnat and blackfly in Goethe’s amber are not anomalies to be explained away. They are part of the immense, consistent pattern of evidence showing that life on Earth has a history measured not in thousands of years, but in hundreds of millions. Modern imaging can now reveal structures Goethe could not have seen, while modern science can place them in a timescale he could not have known.
Creationism, by contrast, has learned nothing comparable. It still begins with an ancient conclusion and tries to force every new discovery into it. Science does the opposite. It follows the evidence, improves its methods, corrects its errors and expands human understanding. Goethe’s amber is a beautiful reminder of that difference: a small, golden fragment of deep time, carrying evidence from a world that existed tens of millions of years before the myths of Genesis were ever written.
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