About 41 million years ago, two flies began their love story, and when they began to meet, they happened to be entangled in the sticky sap of the conifer tree, unable to move, their bodies slowly stiffened, wrapped in resin, fell into the dirt, were buried deeply, and after the wind and rain of time, finally formed an amber - the graveyard of love, which became what we see now.
This amber just happened to capture a moment when the pair of flies mated, and this coincidence was unusually beautiful. But this amber is not simple, its value is not just two mating flies, but more, it helps us understand the life forms of tens of millions of years ago. This amber production period is probably the Eocene, about 53 million years ago to 36.5 million years ago, the second epoch of the Tertiary Period.
However, this amber is only the tip of the iceberg among the amber discoveries by scientists, and in addition to this, the researchers have studied thousands of pieces of amber in Australia and elsewhere in New Zealand. Among these ambers are newborn spiders, plants that grow in Antarctica, ancient ants, and even fragments of amber dating back 230 million years.
How amber is formed
Amber is a fossil of a prehistoric resin, generally believed to be a resin from the Mesozoic Cretaceous to the Cenozoic Tertiary Period, which formed an organic mixture under geological action.
Love in amber, 41 million years of mating moments
The formation of an amber requires three main steps, taking the amber of this fly mating as an example, first the resin is secreted from the tree, and it just traps the two flies, then the resin and insects are buried deep underground, and after the petrification, the composition, structure and characteristics of the resin change. Finally, the resin undergoes a series of geological activities, such as erosion, handling, sedimentation, etc., and finally can form a piece of amber.
How long does amber take to form
Amber, also known as biological fossils, therefore does not form overnight. It needs to be tested by time, tens of millions of years, to become what we see today. Therefore, every piece of amber is very precious.
Amber is a biological fossil, a mirror of life
The key pine resin that produced amber was prehistoric pine resin, and although it is generally believed to have grown in conifer trees from the Mesozoic Cretaceous to the Cenozoic Tertiary Period, scientists have found more ancient fossil specimens. For example, amber specimens dating back to the Triassic period (251 million to 199 million years ago), in which researchers found extinct ferns, most likely the oldest amber in the world.
This suggests that trees with the ability to produce resin may have existed as early as 230 million years ago.
The contents of amber
Amber is often rich in inclusions such as insects and plants. In other amber specimens found in Australia and New Zealand, many surprising plants and animals, such as arthropods, and the seeds and leaves of some extinct plants have also been found. These ancient life seem to be alive in this amber, so vivid that we can still spy on the earth tens of millions of years ago, or even hundreds of millions of years ago.
Future research
Therefore, amber not only allows us to peek into the creatures of tens of millions of years ago, but also deepens our understanding of the prehistoric world. For example, how the flora and fauna on the continent at that time were distributed, and what was the climate. This is all good for us to understand the whole picture of the evolution of our planet.