#amber fossil

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Amber Bug Fossils

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(1) mushrooms, (2) polaroid camera, (3) gravity falls question mark, (4) 1920s oregon map, (5) amber fossil, (6) jar of eyes, (7) gnome statue, (8) gravity falls journal 3, (9) dipper pines hat

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transparent version of this post + view here

[starryspngs]

Amber

Source: X / X

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Last prep post-- This year's AFsona! God its been a while hasnt it

Me when amber fossils and bounes......

[e-ziara]

🦋🍂 MOTHVEMBER day 25-26🍂🦋 Arctornis ecnomoda are Southeast Asian moths, and of course... they just HAD to lay their eggs on durians, don't they? Could not have been me. Look at their cool see-through wings though! Looks like they'll fit right in with the leaves 🍃 At first I was going to colour the crystal white, but I ended up thinking it'll look better as an amber fossil (but also a crystal?). I'm making my white ink pen work for it in this one. Also, now that I think about it, doesn't the Arctornis Ecnomoda look like a fossil too? 🔶

[smimon]

Today at Surimi Snacks: watermelon lemonade, or melonade! 🍉🍋

Btw I'm telling you, at first occasion I will get me like five cups of boba tea hoping it is good. (I only tried a sip once and don't even remember the taste lol)

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

One Step Closer to Jurassic Park?

by Dr. Matt Lamanna

Amber is fossilized tree resin, hardened over time into a natural plastic. Many people know of amber from the film Jurassic Park, in which scientists extract DNA from blood of dinosaurs that had been bitten by insects that were then entombed in amber. Sadly, however, DNA of non-avian dinosaurs (i.e., all dinosaurs except their descendants, birds) has never been successfully extracted from amber or any other fossil.

Nevertheless, exciting new discoveries from the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar (formerly Burma) may bring us one small step closer to someday making Jurassic Park a reality. In a study that appeared today in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications, a team led by Enrique Peñalver of the Instituto Geológico y Minero de España in Madrid, Spain described ticks encased in Burmese amber from the middle Cretaceous Period, roughly 100 million years ago, including several specimens of a new tick species named Deinocroton draculi, or “Dracula’s terrible tick.” One of these ticks is engorged by blood, its volume about eight times greater than that of the non-engorged ticks. Furthermore, specialized hairs of skin beetle larvae—which commonly feed on tough organic matter such as skin, hair, or feathers in nests—are attached to the legs of two Deinocroton ticks. This suggests that these ticks fed on feathered dinosaurs!

Whether the newly-described fossil tick specimens contain traces of dinosaur blood is something that future analyses might tackle. Some of these Deinocroton ticks, including the blood-engorged specimen, have been donated to Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) by one of the study’s coauthors, Pittsburgh-area geologist and amber collector Scott Anderson. The fossils have been formally incorporated into CMNH’s Invertebrate Paleontology collection and will eventually be put on public display.

Top view of the ~100 million-year-old Deinocroton tick from Myanmar that may contain remnants of blood, possibly dinosaur blood. 

Photo credit: Scott Anderson.

The same ~100 million-year-old Deinocroton tick from below.

Photo credit: Scott Anderson.

Matthew Lamanna is a paleontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Learn more about him at carnegiemnh.org