Last week I waxed mildly poetic on the ephemeral nature of living beings and the inorganic reality of a fossil. Fossils are just shadows, I said, or memories ... or something like that.
Well, this week I've got something much more exciting and less poetic. It's an ancient pygmy grasshopper, Electrotettix attenboroughi, and it's no rocky fossil, no sir.
This is a genuine, mint condition, honest-to-God organic grasshopper, encased in a shiny amber shell and preserved for something like 20 million years.
We've all seen Jurassic Park, so I'll skip the whole explanation (and requisite caveats about why THAT won't happen anytime soon), but suffice to say, this grasshopper is looking pretty good. Eyes, wings, antennae, it's all there, looking not a day older than when this unfortunate insect was consumed by smothering sap and molded into an eternal statue.
The wings are especially interesting, partly because they're so puny, ...
