
Fossilized Insect Discovered Not in Amber, but in Opal - sohkamyung
https://entomologytoday.org/2019/01/18/fossilized-insect-discovered-amber-opal/
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garmaine
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.

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

[http://i.huffpost.com/gen/848622/images/o-SVJETLANA-
TEPAVCEV...](http://i.huffpost.com/gen/848622/images/o-SVJETLANA-TEPAVCEVIC-
SEED-POD-PHOTOS-facebook.jpg)

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oblib
That is pretty amazing.

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fjabre
Can we build a park with it?

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astazangasta
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...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073150)

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

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astazangasta
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.

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

