On 29 January 2018, the European Commission announced the results of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie competition for individual grants for researchers – the MSCA Individual Fellowships. A total of 1,348 researchers received a grant to a total value of EUR 250m. The MSCA individual grants are awarded to researchers with more than 4 years of experience (from the moment of obtaining an MA title) or a PhD degree, to conduct research in an institution based in any country, provided that the researcher has been resident in this country for a period longer than 12 months over the past three years (with some exceptions to this rule).

The project entitled “Dating fossils by means of molecular data ─ an innovative approach to determining the age of Baltic amber” (AMBER) is one of four projects to be implemented in Polish research institutions.

The AMBER project’s main objective is to devise a new method to precisely date fossil species preserved in Baltic amber, which will be a ground-breaking achievement in evolutionary research which uses data from fossil materials.

Among fossil resins, Baltic amber from northern Europe is an exceptional deposit, characterised by the great number of specimens preserved inside it. Despite the fact that it is the largest and most diverse source of fossil organisms, with key importance to the dating of the phylogeny of various taxonomic groups, the methods employed so far to determine its geological age have not yielded sufficient results. Developing a new method will be possible by using genetic information, morphological features and the potential of the new method to estimate divergence time, based on Bayesian statistics.

The project will be implemented by Dr Dagmara Żyła under the supervision of Dr Tracy Heath (Iowa State University of Science and Technology) and Dr hab. Jacek Szwedo, Prof. UG (University of Gdańsk).

Project duration: 1 September 2018 – 31 August 2020

Project budget: 147,296.40 EUR

More information at: ec.eutopa.eu