From Seed to Seed:
Plant Science for K-8 Educators

Digging Deeper

Fashionable Fossils

You have probably seen pieces of amber polished and used in jewelry. And many natural history museums have exhibits of insects embedded in amber. So just what is amber? Animal? Vegetable? Mineral?

Amber is fossilized resin; it started out as a sticky substance oozing from trees. Most amber originates from tropical trees of the genus Hymenaea. Members of the legume family, these trees manufacture large amounts of the sticky resin, most likely as a defense against the many types of insects living in a tropical forest. Millions of years ago, pieces of resin were buried under sediments, and preserved in that state until exposed by excavation. Most amber is estimated to be between 25 and 50 million years old.

Apparently, the trees' defense against insects worked-at least in some cases. Paleontologists (and paleoecologists-those who study ancient ecology) study the various insects and other organisms trapped by the resin. They use these observations in their efforts to piece together the ecology of a region at the time that the amber was still a sticky resin. Amber is a kind of "lens" that can allow scientists to look back millions of years, revealing information about climate, sea level, and plant/animal relationships.

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