Sunday, June 17, 2007

Ancient Insects Trapped in Opal











Yesterday evening PBS had a great special by David Attenborough on Opal.

In particular insects and other small life forms trapped in opal.

And the possibility of extracting viable DNA from these creatures that are millions of years old. Maybe from the time of the dinosaurs.

So this morning I hooked the microscope up to the computer and took a few pictures of my opal collection.

Most of these were photographed at ten times magnification or sixty times.


On one I took it up to two hundred times magnification. All are lit from below.