Amber

Do you remember the scenes in the movie "Jurasic Park" in which dinosaurs are cloned by extracting their DNA from ancient mosquitoes preserved in amber? Could this really happen? And why is amber important to paleontologists?

You may have seen amber jewelry for sale at gem and mineral sales. These "stones" are not really stones, but are resin that oozed from trees millions of years ago, and hardened. As tree sap, amber is an organic substance made up of hydrocarbons, and can be melted and even burned. Amber is most commonly seen in a yellow-orange colour, but depending on the type of tree which produced the resin, its chemical composition, and the preservation conditions, amber can appear in many other colours: yellow, white, red, brown, and even green and blue.

Amber is most commonly formed from the resin of coniferous trees (also known as "evergreens"). These conifers grew during the late Mesozoic Era (230 to 65 million years ago) through the Cenozoic Era (65 million years ago to present). The yellow amber formed from the pine tree Pinus succinifera in the Baltic region of Northern Europe is the most commonly found.

Because it was considerably softer than stones, and thus more easily shaped by jewelers, amber has long been a popular material to be made into jewelry and other ornaments. For decorative purposes, amber that contained impurities such as insect parts or tree debris was generally considered to be inferior. As the study of paleontology has advanced and become more popular among non-scientists, what was formerly seen as a blemish in the amber, became to be seen more as a biological curiosity. Jewelers began to mount amber in such as way as to show off insects and leaves that had been preserved in the resin.

Paleontologists, however, had long recognized the importance in the insects, spiders, and leaves that had been preserved in amber. Lacking bones and other hard body parts, arthropods and plant materials do not fossilize well. When they were preserved in amber, they could provide a pristine record of life millions of years ago.

To study insects, spiders, and plant materials in amber, paleontologists will cut a piece of amber into a "thin section", which is then polished and can be viewed through a microscope.

And what about cloning dinosaurs by extracting dinosaurian DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) from the stomachs of mosquitoes preserved in amber? The idea in the book and movie was that if a mosquito was trapped in amber quickly enough after it took a blood meal from a dinosaur, the blood containing the DNA would not have been digested, and then could be cloned. Well, don't buy those tickets to Jurassic Park just yet.

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