Amberguity, Or This Is The Way It Is Poem by Etienne Charilaou

With what astonishing familiarity
this 99-million-year-old specimen,
perfectly preserved in amber,
presents itself.
Looking like a feather duster
it is really the flexible tail-tip
of a juvenile theropod dinosaur.
Destined to be an ornament
it was found by a scientist,
and rescued from an amber market
in Myanmar.

For researchers it is invaluable.
Already the dinosaur feather
is throwing light
on the evolution of feathers,
and dinosaur coloration:
the feathers are chestnut-brown
on their upper surface and a pale colour
or simply white beneath;
the ferrous iron of Haemoglobin
was also detected.

In the amber,
among the fragments of leaves,
fibres and organic detritus
there lies encased an insect,
three-dimensionally intact,
a facsimile of the relatively large
ants we have today.
Are its legs longer
or was it the viscous
relentless amber that
smoothed them out
from the body?
That ant's descendants,
only moments ago,
I saw scurrying on the wall.

If the asteroid had not struck
and sent dinosaurs into oblivion
(for now) ,
then the source of wonder
in the amber
might have been
the tail-section of a certain mammal
(our point of origin) .

How wondrously preserved the fur is!
What it can tell us about the evolution of mammalian fur!