God damn I love amber. What sucks about my divorce is my Polish MiL won’t be bringing me back any more amber with bugs in it :o(
Woah, woah, woah. Is the message of Jurassic Park supposed to be that de-extinction is a bad decision? De-extinction coupled with a theme park lacking in redundant security systems, sure. But let’s not overgeneralize based on the evidence.
I wouldn’t necessarily kill for a 100 million year old bug preserved in amber…but the thought would bang around in my head for a moment or two. I grew up around forests predominantly made up of pine, so things trapped in amber seem so much more real and live than skeletons trapped in mud.
And if I might be allowed a touch of snark, Mr. Poinar of Oregon State U will be publishing his research in the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, a state not necessarily known for its belief in the Cretaceous period, among many other science-y things.
Which is why I said “bad decisions about de-extinction.” Not that de-extinction, itself, is bad. But the decisions made about it at Jurassic Park were probably not the best.
You can get amber with bugs in it on ebay and other sites - just be careful where you buy from. Some of it is copal, which is resin that hasn’t completely hardened into amber, and while it can have real bugs in it, they are are younger, modern species. IIRC a lot of it comes from the Dominican. Baltic amber from Poland and the Ukraine etc is the real deal.
Then you have the jackasses in China making fake amber - plastic. Some of it is super obvious, a perfectly centered scorpion, or a coiled snake or lizard. (For awhile I spent time reporting the frauds, but they just came back under new names. If it actually comes from China, run away!)
Oh - speaking of plants in amber, I have a piece where there was a stick that ran through it, but has since rotted or fallen out so there is a hollow tube running through it.
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