Amber is a petrified resin of ancient trees. In the world, he is not so rare. Over millions of years, the resin, resistant to external forces, along with the trunks, was often drifted by water flows and overlapped by layers of loose rocks. The wood at the same time, as a rule, collapsed, but very unusual transformations took place with the resin - it acquired the properties of a stone. Sometimes layers containing petrified resin - amber, appear again on the surface, as, for example, happened on the coast of the Baltic Sea, and then this witness of bygone eras can become accessible to people.
Of particular interest to jewelers and scientists researching the development of life are stones with inclusions: animals that once fell into the trap, adhered to insects, spiders, and other small creatures attached to the resin. They were not able to free themselves, the resin gradually swallowed them, as if they had been preserved.
Features of stones
Amber is an unusual ornamental stone. If the crystallization of most rocks is a geochemical process that takes place in the depths of the planet, as a rule, at the highest temperatures and colossal pressure, then amber in its formation goes a completely different way. And it does not begin in the bowels, but quite the contrary.
A wound received by a tree, for example, from a lightning strike, in a strong wind or from the fall of another tree, is healed with resin flowing from the vessels. Resin tightens damage, preventing the penetration of parasites, under its layer, integument is gradually restored and the tree continues to grow. At the same time, a brilliant, almost transparent viscous mass attracts various small inhabitants of the forest, and they, in the hope of making money, rush to the damaged tree.
While the tree is growing, the resin remains on its trunk in cracks and chips, filling them. It may also appear inside the trunk, if a young tree has been damaged, gradually this area will be under layers of overgrown wood and bark. When a tree inevitably dies, its trunk, falling, will begin to decompose, but the resin that changed the structure can survive for millions of years, hiding inside itself the prehistoric inclusions.
Amber has always been highly regarded for its unusual color, reminiscent of the sun. Unlike many other ornamental stones, it seems to radiate heat and light. This stone is really warm to the touch.
Pieces of amber with inclusions, once considered a game of nature, peculiar coincidences with the appearance of insects or other small creatures, were always especially valued. The price of such unique pieces of amber can reach tens of thousands of dollars. This is perhaps the only ornamental stone whose price increases due to inclusions.
The share of such stones hardly exceeds 10% of the total volume of all amber mined.
Amber samples from various deposits often differ significantly in their physical properties: shade of color, hardness, fragility. The reason for the differences may be the origin - belonging to different biological species of trees, different ages, the chemical composition of the host species, the depth and many more.
How do they come about?
The formation of biological inclusions is not a rare process, it is happening in our time. Leaking resin is an attractive substance for many insects. However, after touching it, not everyone succeeds in freeing themselves. If the resin continues to leak, a creature accidentally caught will gradually find itself under a layer of this viscous liquid. Such inclusions were called the Latin term “inclusive” (inclusion). Moisture gradually evaporates from the resin that has leaked onto the surface of the trunk, it becomes solid and often grows into the trunk like a foreign body, having fulfilled its task, protecting the damaged organism from external harmful effects.
The animals that have already died in it remain, as it should be, in their place, inside the formed accumulation of resin. Having passed its considerable life path, a tree, like any living creature, dies sooner or later, its wood most often decays, but hardened resin not subject to this process becomes the property of the earth's crust, like an ordinary stone. It is brought in by loose rocks, streams of water influence it, it is thrown along with pebbles by the sea surf. So a stone of different degrees of roundness is formed - amber.
Kinds
Amber retains within itself everything that has got into it, one way or another, for hundreds of millions of years. Modern researchers use pieces of amber in order to restore the composition of the air of past eras, because, in addition to biological inclusions, amber often contains air bubbles. Notice them in processed amber is not at all difficult.
However, the animals preserved in stone are of great interest for the layman, and for specialists.
Often, insects are found in inclusions, of course. Since its appearance on Earth about 150 million years ago, this group of invertebrates has firmly taken the lead in the number of species and the diversity of forms. In this way, insects in amber - this is a natural, one might even say, inevitable phenomenon caused by prolonged cohabitation of insects and plants. The variety of insects in ancient eras was just confirmed by the frequency of their presence inside pieces of amber - fossil resin.
However, inclusions in amber are not limited to representatives of this always large group. More rarely, other animals also became victims of tar: spiders, scorpions, wood lice.Predators must have sought to try their luck near a drop of resin attractive to insects - as a result, they themselves were caught along with their victims. And wood lice are likely to become prisoners of amber due to their slowness. If the resin flowed quickly, then they simply ended up on its way.
Another thing is the rare finds of more complex creatures. So, in one of the pieces of amber, a small lizard was recognized that lived in the forest about 55 million years ago. How did she become a victim of tar? Most likely, she also hunted and approached her in an attempt to watch for the insects that were curling around. Further development of the plot is easy to imagine.
The lizard could use the favorite technique of most of its modern relatives - a sharp throw at an unsuspecting victim. Did her hunt succeed, now it does not matter. The result was a unique amber with a small ancient lizard inside.
The most famous inclusions
A study of amber content began in the 18th century. They began to study it under a microscope and found that inside is really inclusions - the inclusion of foreign bodies, and not at all a game of nature, as previously thought. The study of inclusion has even become one of the areas of paleontology - a science that studies the remains of the ancient inhabitants of the Earth.
Nowadays, thanks to amber, thousands of species of extinct creatures have been described, which otherwise would never have become the property of science. The similarity of the ancient inhabitants with their modern relatives is striking. Already in the Mesozoic on Earth, all modern groups of insects lived, and spiders did not differ from modern ones. And the scorpions were exactly the same.
Pollen preserved in resin and parts of plants also indicate the existence of many modern representatives on Earth for at least one hundred million years.
Truly unique discoveries are found much less frequently, allowing more fully to restore the course of evolution of individual groups of organisms. Of course, far from all of them, and by no means immediately get into scientific laboratories, since it is the uniqueness of individual stones with inclusions that makes them most valuable not only for science, but also at organized auctions.
In Baltic amber, most often there are inclusions containing flying insects, such as mosquitoes, mokrets, flies, and various types of beetles. This allows us to conclude about the past of the region. Most likely, evergreen forests with numerous freshwater reservoirs once grew here. This confirms the presence of various ants - and in our time, typical forest insects.
However, sometimes in amber real unique ones are found. A piece of amber was found in Burma with the remains of a long and thin tail covered with feathers. A comprehensive study of the sample confirmed the assumption that this is the tail of a Cretaceous dinosaur.
No less striking was the discovery of unusual arthropods, taken at first for some scorpions. After a detailed study, a group of arachnids was called tailed spiders. The purpose of the jointed outgrowth of the abdomen of these creatures is still not completely clear.
And absolutely inexplicable is the find inside amber - the product of ancient trees - a small fish or shells of mollusks.
Similar unusual inclusions were found in the Carpathians. It has not yet been possible to explain this fact.
Amber helped to learn a lot about the ancient eras of our planet, however, and at the same time he himself made up an unresolved riddle. Everything was found in pieces of this unusual rock during its entire study - from microorganisms and microscopic pollen to bird feathers and reptile scales, however, still no needles or even fragments of needles of those mysterious trees that gave rise to resin flows have been found that has become amber in millions of years.
About how animals get into amber, see further.
