Amber Is Used As A Girls Name, In A Book Title And Central To A Twentieth Century Mystery

The fossilised resin Amber is a very old substance pre-dating human history and the

age of deposits ranges from 20 to 345 million years old, while pieces of amber have been collected since prehistoric times.

This fossilised resin is classified as a gemstone and nowadays generally it is used in jewellery, including amber pendants and silver amber pendants. In around 3000 BC amber was first traded as a commercial product in the Baltic region and south to Italy and Baltic amber is still regarded as the finest.

It has been worn for general good luck, financial stability, for transforming negative energy and has been used to ward off danger from witchcraft. It is believed to be rich in medicinal values and used for curing many chronic ailments.

In addition to being a popular name for girls (ranking at 52 in the UK) and for a particularly lovely valley in the UK county of Derbyshire, amber has contributed to many other aspects of human knowledge, literature and art.

Possibly the best known are the title of the book Forever Amber, by Kathleen Winsor, published in 1944 and the use of a prehistoric fossil found in a piece of amber to clone the dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park.

After the Crusades in the Middle Ages the Teutonic Knights became absolute rulers of Prussia and the Baltic sources of amber, as well as controlling the manufacture of amber objects such as rosaries. Anyone who was caught with a piece of amber that was not part of a rosary was subject to severe punishment and, often, hanging.

Then there is the famous and still unsolved mystery of the Amber Room, once to be found in the Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was reputedly a fabulous room with wall panels created out of amber.

While there is now a replica amber room in the partially restored palace, what happened to the original has never been absolutely explained. Versions of what happened range from its destruction in a fire at the end of World War Two, to it having been taken away by the Nazis and hidden with other loot that has never been found.

The most recent mention of amber was in another context, this time in a news story in September 2011, when it was reported that shards of amber from two collections in the Royal Tyrrell Museum and private collection in Medicine Hat, Canada, had been examined under a microscope by a student of paleontology at the University of Alberta and revealed some samples of 80-million-year-old protofeathers that visibly chart the evolution of plumage, including increased complexity and different colours, throughout the Late Cretaceous era of dinosaurs.

by: Jude Smith

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