Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
All 10 questions with answers and explanations. Play this daily
Q 01Amber is formed from the fossilized resin of what type of organism?
Trees
Trees. Amber is fossilized tree resin, and its Greek name, elektron, gave English the word electric, because rubbed amber attracts light objects.
Q 02What scientific problem makes Jurassic Park's amber-mosquito dinosaur cloning impossible?
Blood and DNA cannot survive tens of millions of years
Blood and DNA cannot survive tens of millions of years. The oldest DNA ever recovered, from Greenland sediment, is about two million years old, far short of the dinosaur era.
Q 03Which type of creature represents the most common inclusions found in amber?
Insects
Insects are by far the most common organisms found preserved in amber, because small creatures are most easily trapped and engulfed by sticky tree resin.
Q 04What was the first dinosaur body part scientists found preserved in amber?
A feathered tail
A feathered tail. Paleontologist Lida Xing spotted the sparrow-sized young dinosaur's tail in a piece of amber a trader showed him at a market.
Q 05Some of the richest fossil-filled amber from the dinosaur age, about 99 million years old, is mined in which country?
Myanmar
Myanmar. Its Kachin State mines have yielded thousands of species, but paleontologists have urged colleagues to shun the amber over links to conflict and abuses.
Q 06Which conifer family do researchers now think produced the resin of Baltic amber?
Sciadopityaceae (umbrella pines)
Sciadopityaceae (umbrella pines). Infrared analysis matched Baltic amber's resin to this family, whose only living member is Japan's umbrella pine.
Q 07Which tiny creatures are the oldest known arthropods found in amber, preserved in 230-million-year-old droplets from Italy?
Mites
Mites. Two gall-mite species and a fly turned up in the Triassic droplets, some 100 million years older than any earlier arthropods in amber.
Q 08What type of animal was Electrorana limoae, found in 99-million-year-old Burmese amber?
A frog
Electrorana limoae was a tiny juvenile frog, less than an inch long, representing the oldest frog ever found preserved in amber. It provided the first direct evidence that frogs inhabited wet tropical forests during the Cretaceous Period.
Q 09What distinguishes copal from true amber?
It is younger and not fully fossilized
It is younger and not fully fossilized. Copal is tree resin caught partway through the hardening and polymerization that, given more time, turns it into amber.
Q 10A 99-million-year-old amber piece caught an ancient spider doing what to a wasp?
Attacking it in its web
Attacking it in its web. The juvenile spider was about to eat a tiny parasitic wasp, the only fossil ever found of a spider attacking prey caught in its web.