The Lynx Stone
Before amber was understood as fossilized resin, it lived among other myths of solidified vitality. The Lynx Stone (Lapis lyncis or Lyncurium), first described by Theophrastus around 300 BCE, was believed to form from the congealed urine of the lynx. Its yellowish hue and translucency, so similar to amber, made it a substance of fascination — a petrified secretion of a wild, vigilant animal. According to ancient writers, the lynx, jealous of its precious excretion, would bury it in the ground, hiding its power from humankind. Yet the earth, faithful to transformation, gave the stone back to those who searched.
Across centuries, the Lynx Stone persisted as a hybrid of zoology and mineralogy — a creaturely geology that blurred boundaries between the animate and the inert. Its supposed properties mirrored those attributed to amber: the power to attract light objects when rubbed, to warm the body, to strengthen sight and spirit. Early natural philosophers and collectors classified Lyncurium interchangeably with amber, tourmaline, hyacinth, or sapphire, depending on its colour and origin.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the myth had hardened into matter. In the cabinets of curiosity and early materia medica collections, Lapis lyncis specimens were often represented not by organic resin, but by fossils of another kind — the internal guards of extinct cephalopods known as belemnites. These bullet-shaped fossils, common in northern Europe, were smooth, elongated, and honey-coloured, their polished surfaces resembling the fabled lynx stone. Found in clay and chalk strata, they were gathered, traded, and mistaken for the mythical product of animal alchemy.
This confusion reveals more than an error of classification; it speaks to a deep desire to find life within stone, to believe that matter might still carry the secret warmth of the living. Belemnites — once soft-bodied marine creatures turned to mineral — offered a bridge between the organic and the geological, much like amber itself. Both substances are records of transformation: one a fossilized resin that trapped air and insects, the other a fossilized skeleton that preserved the memory of vanished oceans.
The Lynx Stone thus stands as a reminder of how knowledge crystallizes from imagination, and how myth often precedes mineralogy. What was once thought to be animal essence turned out to be the remnant of deep time — a lithic body that, like amber, confounds the division between life and nonlife. In mistaking belemnites for amber, early collectors were not entirely wrong; they simply sensed, perhaps more intuitively than scientifically, the shared pulse that runs through all fossilized things — that ancient tendency of matter to live again through human belief.