Forever amber!

A long-time customer (now friend) of ours occasionally asks me to display something special for him: these are usually fossils or similar objects that we don't trade in. Today a beautiful piece of amber arrived in the post for me to frame under glass. Now I've seen lots of amber - I've even found the odd piece on an East Coast beach - but this is without doubt the best I've come across. It's a 10cm x 3cm piece of Baltic amber, formed sometime between 35 and 45 million years ago - much older (and rarer!) than the cheap stuff one sees in crystal shops at the seaside.

This has numerous amazing inclusions: spiders, gnats, ants, a caddis fly and a moth, all preserved at the moment of their entrapment in pine resin. Not Jurassic Park, exactly, but an amazing window on the prehistoric past.