Insects in Amber

Frozen in Time

Amber is ancient solidified resin. Long ago, while still viscous and sticky, the resin may have engulfed bits of leaves, pine cones, seeds, or insects. Under the right conditions, over time, the resin hardened. With luck, the hardened resin, along with its cargo of trapped contents, got beautifully preserved as solid amber.

Particularly large amounts of amber are found along the shores of the Baltic Sea in northern Europe. In 2001, while visiting Krakow, Poland, I purchased the small piece of insect bearing amber shown magnified in the first picture below. Although it is only about two centimeters long, it contains three insects! The bugs look somewhat like mosquitoes, but without the blood sucking proboscis. They could be small flies called midges. I'm not an expert, so I don't really know what these bugs are. I have no exact age for this particular piece, but Baltic amber is determined to come from approximately the Eocene Era, roughly 54 to 34 million years ago.

Another source of amber is located in the Dominican Republic. Dominican amber formed from the resin of extinct Hymenaea trees during the time of the Oligocene and Miocene Eras, about 30 to 20 million years ago. During my recent visit to the New Jersey Mineral, Fossil, Gem and Jewelry Show I purchased three bits of insect bearing Dominican amber. The next picture shows what looks like a grasshopper leg beautifully suspended within light colored Dominican amber.

All pictures here were taken with a Samsung Galaxy 8 Plus phone camera handheld to the eyepiece of a low power microscope. It was a challenge to hold the camera steady, arrange suitable lighting, and achieve good focus on the insects themselves. As you can see in the three pictures below, results were not always crisp and clear. The next picture shows another piece of Dominican amber. Details of the unknown bug within are blurred by blemishes in the amber.

Next is a magnified image of the unknown bug. There seems to be a wing sticking out the back.

Finally, three insects are suspended within my third piece of Dominican amber shown in the last picture below.

It's astounding to think these trapped insects were alive 20 to 40 million years ago! They lived in a world inhabited by animals now extinct. Nothing remotely resembling a modern human was alive. Even the arrangement of seas and continents around the globe was different than it is today. Yet, through wonderful natural process that produce amber, I can now hold these preserved examples of ancient life in my hand.