Posted on 10/21/2007 6:44:05 PM PDT by blam
How Amber Becomes Death Trap For Watery Creatures
ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2007) — Shiny amber jewelry and a mucky Florida swamp have given scientists a window into an ancient ecosystem that could be anywhere from 15 million to 130 million years old.
Scientists at the University of Florida and the Museum of Natural History in Berlin made the landmark discovery that prehistoric aquatic critters such as beetles and small crustaceans unwittingly swim into resin flowing down into the water from pine-like trees. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The resin with its entombed inhabitants settled to the bottom of the swamp was covered by sediment and after millions of years became amber, a bejeweled version of the tar pits that trapped saber-toothed tigers in what is now California, said David Dilcher, a UF paleo-botanist and one of the study’s researchers.
“People never understood how freshwater algae and freshwater protozoans could be incorporated in amber because amber is considered to have been formed on land,” said Dilcher, who works at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “We showed that it just as well could be formed from resin exuded in watery swamp environments. Later the swamps may dry up and the resin hardens.”
Dilcher and Alexander Schmidt, a researcher at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, replicated the prehistoric demise of the water bugs by taking a handsaw to a swamp on Dilcher’s property near Gainesville in north Central Florida. After they cut bark from some pine trees, the resin flowed into the water and they collected the goo and took it back to Dilcher’s lab on campus.
Stuck in the sticky sap were representatives of almost all the small inhabitants of the swamp ecosystem, Dilcher said. “We found beautiful examples of water beetles, mites, small crustaceans called ostracods, nematodes, and even fungi and bacteria living in the water,” he said.
The discovery not only solved the mystery of how swimming bugs could have been entombed in sticky sap from high up in a tree but could lead to new information about prehistoric, maybe even Jurassic, swamps, Dilcher said. Studying organisms that were trapped for millions of years in amber may help scientists to recreate prehistoric water ecosystems and learn how these life forms changed over time, he said.
While no one is claiming that the entombed bugs will be brought back to life through genetic splicing, the discovery may give clues about the evolution of microorganisms, he said.
“We all think of horses, elephants and people as having changed a great deal through time,” he said. “Have amoeba and other microscopic organisms changed much? Or have they found a niche or what we call a stasis in which their evolutionary lineage persists for many hundreds of millions of years? We don’t have the answers to those questions until we look at the fossil record.”
Insects such as bees, spiders, tics and fleas that become embedded in amber have received a great deal of attention because they are so abundant, Dilcher said. “Unfortunately, people have overlooked the little things while searching for the big bugs and the flowers in amber,” he said.
Microorganisms are important because they form relationships with higher organisms, making them the foundation of the pyramid of life, Dilcher said. “To understand more about their evolution adds an important step in our understanding of life itself,” he said.
Gene Kritsky, editor of the journal American Entomologist and a biology professor at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, said Dilcher has performed a great service in answering a question that has long puzzled scientists, the seemingly contradictory aspect of finding aquatic insects in tree resin.
“It’s been one of the strange things mentioned by biologists and entomologists for decades – how do you account for aquatic insects and organisms in what seemed to be an ancient terrestrial environment,” Kritsky said. “Dilcher examined this contradiction by creating the conditions that would cause sap deposits to flow into water to see what would happen. The results demonstrated that aquatic insects can be trapped in resin without leaving their aquatic world. Thus, the presence of aquatic organisms in amber is the result of a simple natural process.”
Adapted from materials provided by University of Florida.
Check out Steuben and Goya also. These 3 ships sank killing over 15,000 deaths near the end of the war.
Where is it? Will it ever be found? I think it's lost/hidden in a secret storage cave.
That article is dated 1998. (Ahem)
I’d rather eat live monkey brain, and I don’t even know how to use chopsticks.
“Ahem”
LOL! Obviously, nothing was found...I’ll keep an eye on the dates from now on.
Fred, your contributions are great. (I’m just ‘funning’ you.)
I got to go down into an amber mine in the Dominican Republic. It was in a gray layer of rock between two other layers of darker rock. The gray layer had thin black layers that got more and more numerous from the top and bottom of the stratum until they met in a seam in the middle of the stratum. In this seam is found nodules of amber. The stratum was too thin to make a walkable tunnel. It was squat in and squat out. Inside, it smelled like there had been a considerable amount of squatting of other sorts.
The mining of amber generally take the same form throughout the island. The amber can be found through land slips which occur on the steep mountain sides. The fossil resin occurs in lignitic beds which when located are dug out. If the amber extends deep into the side of the mountain shafts are dug by hand to follow the deposit.
In pictures the author has seen, the mines look perilously unsafe with miners operating sometimes 200 feet into the mountain itself and in some cases without the mine being sheared or reinforced.
Interesting...love the frog with too many legs...
A rather interesting frog was discovered in amber on the island during 1996 which shed light on how colonisation progressed through the West Indies. It was also noted in this particular specimen that several additional leg bones were present, more than the frog must have possessed. It is speculated by scientists that the frog and the additional legs could have been dropped by a bird who may have been using a branch or tree overhanging an embalming pool of resin which received the dropped frog and leg bones and over millions of years became amber.
Oh goodness gracious me...
I have one piece filled with what looks like mayfly wings. I have one little piece containing a leaf that looks like an apple leaf, and another with what appears to be the tip of a branching coniferous plant. No spiders, frogs, or other vertebrates, though, but a few ants.
http://samogitia.mch.mii.lt/LANKYTINOS_VIETOS/ambermus.en.htm
Amber was mentioned for the first time in the Assyrian cuneiforms in the 10th century B. C. Ancient myths and legends reflect man’s attemts to solve the mystery of the origin of amber. The Lithuanian legend about sea-goddess Jurate and a fisherman Kastytis is the first attempt of Lithuanians to explain the origin of amber. According to the legend amber pieces are fragments of goddess Jurate’s underwater castle struck by Perkunas (the Thunder god) and her tears.
http://www.virtualmuseum.us/lith/ignas/jurkas77.html
The Legend of Jurate and Kastytis
According to an ancient Lithuanian legend, the sea-goddess Jurate fell in love with a fisherman Kastytis. When the thunder-god Perkunas found out, he became very angry about Jurate’s love for a mere mortal. He struck down Jurate, shattered her undersea palace made of amber, and tied Kastytis to a huge underwater rock.
It is said that, when the winds whip up raging storms in the Baltic Sea, one can still hear Kastytis moaning and, afterwards, one can still find small pieces of Jurate’s amber palace washed out on the Baltic shore.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/srp/srp05.htm
According to a Lithuanian legend, known also to other Indo-European nations, the Thunder-God created the universe by the action of warmth—Perkunas wis iszperieje. The verb perieti (present form periu) means to produce by means of warmth, to hatch, to bear, being akin to the Latin pario, and the Russian parit’ 1.
In Lithuania Perkunas, as the God of Thunder, was worshipped with great reverence. His statue is said to have held in its hand “a precious stone like fire,” shaped “in the image of the lightning,” and before it constantly burnt an oak-wood fire. If the fire by any chance went out, it was rekindled by means of sparks struck from the stone.
...the following myth is related about the marriage of the Moon, a male deity in the Slavo-Lettic languages:—
The Moon wedded the Sun
In the first spring.
The Sun arose early
The Moon departed from her.
The Moon wandered alone,
Courted the Morning Star.
Perkunas greatly wroth
Cleft him with a sword.
“Wherefore dost thou depart from the Sun?
Wandering by night alone?
Courting the Morning Star?”
Full of sorrow [was his] heart...
[singing] Bad, bad, blood, blood...
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