For three weeks, visiting spider researchers David Penny and Daniel P?rez-Gelabert studied the fossil collection at the Puerto Plata Amber Museum and the Santo Domingo World Amber Museum. Penny is a researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Manchester, and Perez-Gelkabert is a research associate at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.
The Puerto Plata amber museum?s collection includes lizards and the world?s largest feather in amber, currently on exhibit. During the stay, 82 amber spiders were studied, including one that Penny says is unidentified. He returned to the UK with the fossil for further study. Penny says that the highlight of the trip was his visit to the La Toca amber mines situated just below the crest along the northern side of the Cordillera Septentrional, between Puerto Plata and Santiago. These are basically holes dug manually that follow the amber-bearing veins into the side of the mountain. The digging and extraction process is done by hand with the most sophisticated machine used being a battery-operated cassette recorder to listen to the traditional Dominican bachata music. The trip prompted many interesting observations in both the fossil and the recent faunas, and Penny says the collaboration with people and institutions in the DR will continue. He will continue to work with Puerto Plata Museum owners, Michele and Ada (Didi) Costa and Jorge Caridad of the Santo Domingo Museo Mundo de ?mbar. For more information on the spiders, contact david.penney@man.ac.uk