Ground Beetle in Baltic Amber

Carabidae. Kaliningrad, Russia. 50 million years.

Insects captured in amber, a fossil resin, are some of the most attractive examples of primeval life.

FOSSIL DNA?
Many spiders and insects have only survived as fossils because they were trapped in amber. Amber is the general term used to describe fossil resins from various plants, which can also be of various ages. The largest and prolific fossil amber deposits are from the Eocene in the Baltic and the Miocene in the Dominican Republic.
The Baltic amber came from an extensive forest region, which stretched from modern Scandinavia to the Urals. The resin is probably mainly from golden larches and Japanese umbrella pines. 50 million years ago, in the late Eocene, the forest was threatened by a gradual deterioration in the climate and increased attack by parasites. Possibly, the excessive resin production was a stress reaction by the trees to these adverse environmental factors.
The ground beetle, which was purchased from Dresden in 1847, is just one of many star items in the NHM’s amber collection. However, as amber is damaged by ultraviolet light, only a few top pieces are displayed.
When the first attempts were made in the 1990s to extract genetic information (DNA) from an insect enclosed in amber around 125 million years old, this was celebrated as a new era in science. Today, however, we know that the biochemistry of inclusions in amber is fundamentally altered. Although the shape of the internal organs is often outstandingly preserved, all attempts so far to extract fossil DNA from amber inclusions have been without success.