Nice find!
Things like this always make the fossil/mineral collector in me smile :-)
A hundred million years ago, an amber flow spoiled a spider’s day: it had waited, possibly for hours, to ambush a wasp in its web, and just as it decided to strike, spider, wasp and web were all trapped forever. The good news for us is that it’s turned up at a dig in Myanmar's Hukawng Valley, and here's what it looks like: …
I own a tiny piece of amber with a little tiny fly in it. I used to have the details of the exact dates, etc. but can't find them now.
I find it wonderful, even if it's nowhere near as magnificent as this one. I actually kept my QX3 just so that I could look at the insect (which is very near an internal crack / impurity in the amber so is difficult to spot from some angles).
It always makes me wonder just how they get caught in it - I mean, did it drop from the tree onto their heads (surely that would squish them slightly), did it ooze around them (and then you'd have expected the spider to let go or be seen to be moving away), or what?
My tiny fly, hell, it could have been dead before it even ended up in there - it's hard to tell. But this one makes amber take on a whole new menace for insects. Future sci-fi plot anyone?
> It always makes me wonder just how they get caught in it
It starts out as pine sap which is fairly runny but very sticky, it's basically varnish. The initial impact wouldn't be much worse than getting hit by a large rain drop, but it builds up as the drips keep coming.
Beer icon as it used to get tested by a chap in leather trousers sitting on a wooden bench with a puddle of beer on it. If he stuck to the bench when he tried to stand up it was acceptable beer...
"But this one makes amber take on a whole new menace for insects"
Never mind insects - maybe the Ruskies could use it to help out with the problem of keeping Lenin in good shape. Pour a few gallons of tree resin round him, and let it set, and he'd be good for the next hundred million years, a bit like Plastikraft, but more organic.
Anyone else deserving of a dip?
"The wasp was watching the spider just as it was about to be attacked, when tree resin flowed over and captured both of them"
should have gone for a career in script writing for tv commercials.
Actually, the wasp's looking the other way, hence "trembling in anticipation of sealing fate, as the spider pounced, and the resin gushed in to entomb them both, once and for all"
"But resin doesn't gush, it tends to do a rolling ooze."
You've never hit a 25+ gallon sap pocket in a big pine with a chainsaw, have you? I have, twice. It's about 90% water when it comes out. If you can hose off in a hurry, it's not all that bad on a personal level ... but the clothes/gear you were wearing are toast. Took the better part of a day to clean the saw, both times.
Nah, a fossil just refers to what is left behind marking the existence of a living thing from a "former geologic age." Other good examples of those not formed by tissue replacement are footprints left in mud that later solidified into rock or the early legislation of politicians who have served since the time of the dinosaurs.