14 interesting facts about Amber
- The oldest amber recovered dates to the Upper Carboniferous period (320 million years ago).
- Amber has been used since antiquity in the manufacture of jewelry and ornaments, and also forms the flavoring for akvavit liquor.
- Amber is not a mineral but an organic product. It is fossilized resin of ancient trees living 25 to 50 millions years ago, but some pieces have been found which can be as old as 130 millions years.
- Commercially most important are the deposits of Baltic and Dominican amber.
- The Greeks called amber «elektron», the word from which electricity was derived because it becomes electrically charged when rubbed with a cloth and can attract small particles.
- Amber is a unique preservational mode, preserving otherwise unfossilizable parts of organisms; as such it is helpful in the reconstruction of ecosystems and organisms.
- The Greeks thought it was pieces of solidified sunshine, believing solidification occurred when pieces where broken off as the sun sank into the sea.
- Insects, spiders and their webs, annelids, frogs, crustaceans, bacteria and amoebae, marine microfossils, wood, flowers and fruit, hair, feathers and other small organisms have been recovered in ambers dating to 130 million years ago.
- Amber was in fashion among Roman women, who had the habit of carrying a small piece in the hand for the odor it emitted when warmed in this way. During this time, according to Pliny, a small figure carved from the material would cost more than a «healthy slave».
- The Romans even sent armies to conquer and control amber producing areas.
- The presence of insects in amber was noticed by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia and led him to the (correct) theory that at some point, amber had to be in a liquid state to cover the bodies of insects.
- By the year 1400, certain orders of knights controlled the trade of amber and unauthorized possession of raw amber was illegal in most of Europe. Among other beliefs, amber has been assumed to alleviate goiter.
- Amber has been used since the Neolithic, from 13,000 years ago.
- Because of the small insects who could have been trapped inside, amber has helped paleontologists to reconstruct life on earth in its primal phases, and more than 1,000 extinct species of insects have been identified this way.
