Waiter... There's a Bug in my Pendant!

I was just recently looking through some old photos on Matt's computer, when I found some really cool ones I'd forgot about. The photos were quite old but I realised I never even saw them zoomed in! Anywhoo, here's the story...

For my birthday last year, Matt got me this really cool present. It was a beautiful amber pendant, the very clear yellow kind, set in a silver rim. It was really beautiful! But there was something special about that particular piece of amber... it had a mosquito inside!

Someone I knew had a similar pendant, but it was extremely smokey, and the mosquito was barely visible. The pendant Matt got me was almost perfectly clear, so it's a perfect little window to the (prehistoric?) insect inside.

It turns out that these pieces of amber are found in the Baltic sea, and it's not all that rare to find insects sealed inside. I guess Jurassic Park lied to me and there'll be no reviving of dinosaurs at the Manea household any time soon.

The amber is so clear that the mosquito is perfectly visible just by holding it over a white sheet of paper. But (trust us to do it...), we wanted a closer look! So we got a microscope and focused it on the buggy part of the amber. This was actually REALLY hard to do, since we had to hold the pendant with our hand, and even slight movements meant that the area was lost from the viewer.

Eventually we managed to get the hang of it and actually got some pictures down the viewer! It really is amazing - the mosquito is perfectly intact. His wings are perfectly straight, and his little feet are even poised up like he's clapping (it's probably about as cute as a mosquito gets).

So while I think this is the most interesting piece of jewelery I own, some people tend to disagree. My grandma seemed confused about the whole thing and Matt's mum mentioned that she would be angry if her jewelery had a bug in it! I guess people usually get angry when there are bugs in things - their soup, their drink, their wet paint, their pants (?), but it was certainly a nice surprise this time :)