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What is it?






















Baltic amber with an ant and a couple of air bubbles nearby. All Baltic amber has a general age range of 34 to 48 million years old.

I posted this little guy once before (I think in the OT), but I just re-shot it with new equipment and was able to produce a much better image.



There is a little hazing and distortion from having to shoot through the amber, along with various debris, so a lot of clean-up was required. That top image is pixel-for-pixel (1000 x 1000), the bottom one resized down to 1000 pixels wide. The original is 9504 pixels wide.

This is 336 images, focus-stacked at 5-micron intervals in groups of 4 pixel-shifted images, then stacked into 84 images, then slabbed into 12 stacks, then a final stack. Cleaned up in Photoshop afterwards. I left it pretty dang orange, but I like it better that way and the bubble turned out much better than expected.

cool pic.

1. Are you in possession of this amber?
2. If so, how did you come by it?
3. In Lamens terms, how big is the ant?

Looks like approx 2mm

Great work & cool pic. Thanks for posting.

1. Yes

2. I bought it maybe 20 years ago or so at a rock and mineral show in Austin. I got this piece and another that contains a midge fly. Amber isn't hard to find but you have to buy from a reputable source because there are fakes. I also got one of my favorite fossils at the same show, a complete gar fish.

3. The ant measures out to be around 2.3mm total if he was straight. I had previously thought it was closer to 1mm but that was when I had photographed it with different equipment that I had not checked with a calibration tool. The bubble is right at 0.65mm.

Here's a crummy camera phone pic to get a better idea of the size. You can see the ant and you can barely make out the bubble to the left of him. The bubble looks smaller than it is because the edges are faint in this pic and you're just seeing the center. It's also deeper in the amber than the ant:

that is a cool pic, thanks for sharing