1 Forty million years ago, when the earth was much wetter and warmer, huge forests with many kinds of trees thrived in the far north. Out of some of these trees, stretching as tall as ten-story buildings, oozed a sticky resin. Mosquitoes buzzed through the forests, grasshoppers and crickets leaped, and ants and spiders scurried by the trees in search of food. If they carelessly let a leg or wing touch the resin-zap!-they were stuck, preserved like mummies in an airtight trap.

2 Millions of years passed, and the climate of the earth altered dramatically. The northlands turned cold and icy. The giant trees fell, buried under the salt water that now covered the land. Far beneath the water, the globs of resin slowly changed, hardening into solid, glowing pieces of amber.

3 Still millions of years later, storms at sea broke the amber free and tossed it onto beaches for early cave dwellers to find. The cave dwellers wondered if the strange golden stone, warm to the touch, could be solid sunlight. Using flint and bone tools, they carved pieces of amber into the shapes of animals or the sun and wore them on cords around their necks for magical protection. When early Chinese people found amber the color of tigers' stripes, they believed it held the souls of dead tigers and they treasured it as a source of courage.

4 . . . For hundreds of years, people used amber in jewelry or to decorate warriors' weapons; some soldiers braided amber beads in their horses' manes to ensure success in battle. Amber was also ground fine and mixed with honey, oil of roses, and crabs' eyes or claws for use as medicine. Amber mixtures were believed to cure earaches, headaches, and any number of diseases. Even wearing buttons or beads carved from amber was thought to keep a person well. As amber became more valuable, sea traders making money on the precious commodity protected their trade routes by inventing stories about giant serpents, evil sea witches, and other terrors of sailing in search of the golden substance.

5 . . . Some pieces of amber have air bubbles inside that keep the light from passing through, making it look cloudy, but many others are clear like glass. The pieces of amber with inclusions of early life or gas bubbles are the most valuable to scientists. They hold clues about the earth's ecology millions of years ago and enable scientists to compare early life forms with today's. More than a thousand kinds of insects have been found preserved in amber, from prehistoric flies that proved to be the ancestors of our houseflies to a 140-million-year-old weevil that lived at the time of the dinosaurs. Whole flights of insects were sometimes trapped in one glob of resin; one two-inch piece of amber has 2,000 ants in it! Although most of the preserved insects are now extinct, their descendants may still survive, sometimes in new places. A termite found in Mexican amber now lives only in Australia.

6 Scientists use x-rays to study skeletons of frogs and lizards, seeds inside fruit, and other inclusions without opening the amber. They also scan the surface of ancient mummified insects with electron microscopes, revealing such detail as preserved muscle fibers and the spinning glands of trapped spiders. In addition, scientists can extract DNA directly from an amber inclusion. Amber is the only known fossil from which ancient DNA can be recovered.

7 Many natural history museums have pieces of amber on display. Look for them during your next visit. These golden traps, 40 or more millions of years old, are the closest thing we have to snapshots of our ancient past.
English Language Arts, Grade 4