Word: resin
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...whole kitchen. Some of the catalog entries for this show, listing title, date and materials, sound more like small towns than works of art: "The Ozymandias Parade, 1985. Tableau: wood, plastic, mirrored plexiglass, fiberglass horses, light bulbs, recorded music, paint, clothing, plaster casts, rubber, metal, galvanized sheet metal, polyester resin, wagon, pork barrel, suitcases, fake money, telephone, miniature flags, and toys, 147 x 349 x 180 [inches...
...substance that's essentially dried-up tree resin. The viscous stuff that eventually turns into amber comes from a variety of ancient trees, mostly conifers, including pines and extinct relatives of sequoias and cedars, but also some deciduous trees. It probably evolved, says Grimaldi, as a defense against wood-boring insects. "As it dripped down the bark," he explains, "it acted like flypaper and encapsulated them, hermetically sealing the trees' wounds at the same time...
Eventually the trees and their stalactites of dried resin fell, some of them ending up buried in soft sediments at the bottom of still and shallow bodies of water. There, over millions of years, the molecules of resin gradually amalgamated into long, durable chains, creating a material remarkably like plastic: airtight, watertight, chemically inert...
Although wood-boring insects might have been its target, the resin would also trap anything else that happened to stumble into it, including small lizards and frogs. Bad luck for them, but extraordinary good fortune for evolutionary biologists. In one major deposit--a site in New Jersey whose location is closely guarded--Grimaldi and a team of volunteers have found nearly 100 previously unknown ancient species of plants and animals. These and other discoveries around the world have given scientists some important insights into the workings of natural selection--how, for example, insects and flowers helped guide each other...
...right, the secret may be amber. This semiprecious substance, observes Ward Wheeler, a molecular evolutionist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, provides a unique window on the history of life. Down through the ages, sudden flows of sticky, honey-colored tree resin have ensnared all manner of small life forms, including beetles, spiders, and even lizards and frogs. Moreover, as this natural polymer hardens, it becomes virtually airtight and waterproof. Not only are extinct organisms like Cano's bee preserved in exquisite anatomical detail, but biological molecules such as dna appear to be largely protected...