Sap-Encrusted Bugs On Display

Sun., June 29, 1997

Hank Burchard Washington Post

When bugs bite them, trees don’t just stand there and take it. Some fight back with sap. The battle has been raging for millions of years, and the world is littered with the corpses of the slain (including countless innocent bystanders), entombed in sap that has hardened into amber.

A czar’s ransom of these gleaming sarcophagi, equally prized for their beauty and as scientific specimens, is on view at the National Museum of Natural History. It’s the museum’s second experiment with pay-per-view exhibitions, with an admission charge of $4 for everyone over 8 years old.

“We hate to do it, but we need the money,” says a museum spokesman. What the heck, that’s less than 2 cents a look at the 240 scientific and decorative pieces, including quite a few of the world’s rarest and most valuable amber objects.

Such as three of the four frogs that have ever been found in amber and the earliest known specimens of bees, ants and mushrooms. And the world’s oldest preserved flower, a unique oak blossom from the Cretaceous Period (140 million to 65 million years ago).

There are much-older fossil flowers, of course; while this ancient sap is called fossil amber, the imbedded plant and animal tissues are not fossilized. Some are so well preserved that it has been possible to analyze their DNA, giving science a powerful tool for puzzling out evolutionary paths.

Some specimens were half-eaten, half-rotten or crushed before the sap closed over them, but others are so well-preserved that the iridescent hues of a butterfly wing can still be seen, and the electron microscope reveals the structure of the tongue muscles of a 25-million-year-old stingless bee, along with the pollen grains in its stomach.

Unspoken but evident in the exhibition, which originated at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is the ongoing struggle between private and scientific amber collectors, who both most highly prize pieces with animal and plant inclusions. Many of the pieces in the show are in private hands, although most collectors are fairly generous in allowing non-destructive study of them.

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