100,000,000 years

April 1, 2008 8:34 PM

The little windows in the walls of time amber provides aren't always open. Opaque amber is common and, until now, has hidden away many fossil creatures. 100,000,000 years.... via bbc

There are links to a very pretty animation at the bottom of the ESRF page. They're big....it'll take 100,000,000 years to wait for it to play in the browser. It was quicker to save it and play it on the machine. It's a lot of space to take up on a drive, but the last part of the animation is pretty neat....

posted by Kronos_to_Earth (7 comments total)

Wow, after I get my piece of Blue Amber, I'll go for this one. Gotta catch 'em all!
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:41 PM on April 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

Very interesting. The feather was pretty exciting.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 8:44 PM on April 1, 2008

The Cretaceous gave us fly paper but it took Shell to give us the No Pest Strip.
posted by Tube at 8:49 PM on April 1, 2008

Wow, A.V., that's the first time I'd ever heard of or seen blue amber. Very cool.

Neat post Kronos!
posted by darkstar at 9:48 PM on April 1, 2008

I found a piece of opaque amber just last week. At least, I wasn't sure it was opaque amber until this post - whereupon I put the curiously soft little stone under my x-ray vision and behold ! ... need .img tag...

Nice post, and the piece I found really does look exactly like the pictures. How curious to think there could very well be some millenia-old bug part in there. (Or not. It's perfect!)
posted by From Bklyn at 1:12 AM on April 2, 2008

Lovely. Thank you.
posted by malaprohibita at 4:30 AM on April 2, 2008

This is fantastically cool. I hadn't heard of blue amber either, but now I yearn for it. Lovely post.
posted by bayliss at 7:26 AM on April 2, 2008