Dinosaur DNA
Some of the insects suspended in amber today lived alongside dinosaurs, their small bodies sealed in resin at a moment when the Mesozoic world was still unfolding. These inclusions — tiny wings, trapped legs, the suggestion of a compound eye — belong to a span of deep time stretching more than 65 million years into the past. For decades, scientists and storytellers alike have wondered what secrets these insects might carry within them. Because many of them fed on blood, it was tempting to imagine that their bodies still held molecular traces of the giants that once roamed the earth. The fantasy was simple and seductive: that amber, this translucent time capsule, might preserve not only form but also the genetic essence of vanished creatures.
It was this hope — part scientific speculation, part mythic longing — that helped inspire the premise of Jurassic Park. In the film, dinosaur DNA is miraculously recovered from blood-filled insects locked in amber, allowing an entire lost world to be reborn. Reality, of course, is more resistant. DNA decays far too quickly to survive such geological spans, and the amber’s beauty far outlasts the fragile molecules it entombs. Yet the allure remains. Amber invites us to imagine time not as a vast erasure but as a medium capable of holding echoes — an ancient insect, a moment of entrapment, a gesture toward a life long dissolved into stone.