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Show Fossil Insects of Dinosaur Age Are Found in Amber Cambridge, Mass. Fossil insects in-sects of the Cretaceous, the twilight age of the dinosaurs, have been collected in northern Canada by methods reminiscent reminis-cent of gold rush days in the Yukon, by Profs. Charles T. Brues and F. M. Carpenter of Harvard university. The Insects are embedded in lumps of amber and are the first of this age to be found, as the Baltic amber of Europe is of more recent Tertiary origin. Millions of years ago, when the amber was oozing pitch on the trunks of conifer coni-fer trees, they got stuck and embedded. em-bedded. Then the gummy stuff was buried, and slowly hardened to amber, am-ber, giving its victims a truly royal entombment. Professor Brues led a small party far into northern Manitoba. They pitched camp on the shores of an isolated lake, where amber was known to occur. Instead of a continuous shore of sand, mud or rock, this lake beach is formed of ground-up wood. The battered debris from logs and trees washed into the lake by the Saskatchewan Sas-katchewan river forms this unusual shoreline material. In this the small lumps of amber are included. "Fanned" the Fossils. Dr. Brues and hi3 party shoveled this wooden "sand" into pans, and washed it in a stream in the approved ap-proved gold - panning ritual. The heavy amber settled to the bottom, and the lighter wood fragments were washed over the edge. In this way the party accumulated a quantity of amber bits weighing altogether al-together about 400 pounds. They have not yet had time, since returning to the laboratory, to give this amber treasure more than a swift preliminary looking over. Detailed De-tailed examination will require many months of work, with the collaboration col-laboration of many specialists. |
