Inclusions

Five days of spheres is too much...for me anyway. I had intended to talk about inclusions in the next post and decided (with the hint of a friend) to indeed show an inclusion, but of a different type than originally contemplated.
This is a picture of the interior of an amber nodule from the Baltic Sea coast---and life sometime between 23 and 33.9 million years ago, maybe older. One day, back then, an ant was trapped in the fresh tree resin and along came an opportunistic arachnid, surmised an easy supper, and became mired beside it. Maybe the spider did not conceive that it would get stuck since its own web material does not effect any adhesion on its legs whereas other hapless critters generally become hopelessly entangled. At least it had a last meal, which is more than the ant could have said.

Looking carefully at the area near the spider's feet, one can observe disturbances on the amber; rings that evidence the spider's struggle to free itself.

Especially after "Jurassic Park"---book and movie---amber with insect or other inclusions has become a rather popular collectable. While there are plenty of examples on the market, it is still incredibly rare stuff to see "action" frozen in time. First, most tree resin isn't even preserved. It rots away on the forest floor unless ideal conditions come along to preserve it. Second, the ratio of nondescript "junk" trapped in the amber to well preserved, identifiable objects is rather high. Third, taken from there, the percentage of identifiable victims caught in the act of doing something other than having collided with, stepped on, or otherwise managed to get themselves glued to the nice, fresh resin, has to be minuscule. At least in my experience.

Tree resin: easy to find. Fossilized tree resin: cool. Hapless individual(s) caught doing something embarrassing and recorded for millions of years and all to see: priceless.