Fossilized Insect Discovered Not in Amber, but in Opal

entomologytoday.org

52 points·sohkamyung··9 comments

Confusing title. Fossilized life is what Opal is. When you have fossilization processes add different minerals in distinct, microscopically thin layers (because the skin/shell/tissue is thin), the resulting fossil has brilliant colors in the visible light, just like a streak of oil on water or an insect's wing reflects and refracts sunlight. Opal mines are basically underground fossil hunts, and it's no coincidence that the major Opal producing sites are also in paleontological areas.

What seems to have happened here is that an insect got trapped in amber, and then that amber got fossilized, which resulted in much more structure being visible than is normally the case.

Couldn't it be vegetable in origin? Seed pods can be very complex

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/848622/images/o-SVJETLANA-TEPAVCEV...

That is pretty amazing.

Can we build a park with it?

No:

Absence of Ancient DNA in Sub-Fossil Insect Inclusions Preserved in ‘Anthropocene’ Colombian Copal https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Excellent. Thank you. Do you think there is any hope of finding intact DNA from something as old as Triassic period for example?

Doubtful. DNA is stable, but its stability is maintained by a cushy cellular environment which is full of scaffold molecules and repair enzymes. By contrast upon death outside the safety of an intact nucleus DNA will immediately start getting chewed apart by DNAses. Then there is UV, which will slowly but surely degrade DNA over time. I think the record for intact DNA is less than a million years; there is zero chance we could get something from 65 million years ago.

Or a farm. Brontosaurus burgers!

Was excited when I thought this had something to do with stop codons

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