The Amber Forest: A Reconstruction of a Vanished World.

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Summary: Bugs, Plants, Frogs in Sap Tip Us to Primeval Jungle
Review: Millions of years ago, a meat-eating animal snuck through the primeval forest in what is now the Dominican Republic. Taking a short break in the shade of the towering canopy, it sat on some bamboo shoots which broke off in its fur. As the animal continued on its search for its next meal, the shoots began to irritate it. Growling (as I imagine), it rubbed up against an algarrobo tree. Some of the irritating plant fell out, along with one or two of the animal's hairs. These things fell into some resin or sap which exuded from the tree. The sap preserved them perfectly. Later the large drop of sap fell to the ground, was covered by debris which turned to earth, burying the sap completely. It lay there for a million or more years, then the ocean rose, taking the object to the bottom, where it was polished or preserved for more millions of years. Finally, due to the tectonic movements of the earth's plates, the ocean bottom where the (now) amber lay rose up into the mountains of an island. When Europeans arrived there in the tiny fragment of time known as "history" in this whole unbelievable span, they dug out the amber and found the preserved proof of that one moment in an animal's activities a possible 25 million years ago !

Poinar and Poinar have created a fascinating scientific work with their reconstruction of what the forest of that epoch looked like. Using the thousands of examples of plants, seeds, petals, leaves, pollen, insects, and frogs or lizards that fell into the tree sap and were preserved like time capsules, they describe the ancient jungle long before any man trod this earth. They rely on the principle of behaviorial fixity-that is, the idea that species that fill certain ecological niches today did so in the past as well. They describe dozens of strange creatures, mostly insects (because they were abundant and small enough to get trapped often) that inhabit today's tropical forests as well as those in the past. The majority of the book is devoted to describing as many organisms as possible with an enormous number of black and white photographs and line drawings to help your imagination. They also have a whole section of color photographs of the actual amber pieces. At the end there is a short reconstruction (or summary) of the whole vanished forest as well as an interesting discussion of climatic change and the reason for the disappearance of many species between that time and the present. Not being a person with a scientific background, I found all these things excitingly different from my usual reading fare, but the language used-apart from having to deal with such terms as homozygotic, depurination, dehiscent, and phytotelmata, which don't exactly roll off my tongue-is understandable by any educated lay reader. I found THE AMBER FOREST one of the most fascinating books of science that I have ever read and one of the best books in any field that I've read recently. If learning about the symbiosis of plants and insects, parasites and hosts, ants and fungus, in fact all the biological world of a long-gone jungle, has any appeal to you, don't miss this work.


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Summary: Amber
Review: This book tells of the author's adventures looking for amber as well as facts about it.