Oldest Desmid on Photomacrography.net

[Peter M. Macdonald]

This is a fossil desmid, from the Eocene Baltic amber. Micrasteris has been around for a very long time. As you can see, al of the cell contents have gone, just leaving the cell wall.

It seems that the amber producing resin flowed down the tree and into pools on the forest floor where it could trap all sorts of microscopic freshwater life.

Photograph taken on a Leitz Orthoplan, through a NPL x 6.5 0.20 objective, with an Olympus NFK x 2.5 projection eyepiece on a Canon EOS 1D III. Cropped to slightly less than actual pixels. It would have been nice to have used a higher power of objective, but this is the highest that would play well with the thickness of the piece of amber.

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[Mitch640]

Very nice image.

It seems that the amber producing resin flowed down the tree and into pools on the forest floor where it could trap all sorts of microscopic freshwater life.

I use to work in heavily forested areas of the American Southwest. The mountans of Arizona and New Mexico. Once into higher elevations, it's thick pine forest, and no desert. Lot's of water from springs and snowmelt. I have seen piles of tree sap that fell from injured trees, one drop at a time, collecting on the ground. It's soft and pliable and very sticky. It traps anything that touched it. If it fell near a stream or pond, all it would take is a pinecone landing in the water nearby and splasing water onto the sap. It would dry there and leave behind anything in it. It probably happened millions of times through the ages.

[Wim van Egmond]

It reminds me of an april fools joke we made for the dutch desmids site. We made a scientific article about a marine species of Micrasterias. I used two new semicells of a dividing desmid and combined them to create something that looked like a new species.



Wim

[Peter M. Macdonald]

Mitch,

Glad to hear of someone else who observes how these things formed. To most, it seems couner intuitive at least that a tree should fossilise something which lives in fresh water. There are quite a lot of micro-organisms known from a variety of ambers all over the world now, from bacteria through desmids, diatoms, fungo spores...the list goes on.

Wim,

I prommise - this is real. These have been known in Amber since some of the earliest publications on the fossil plants of the amber (no need to describe as Baltic then, as there was no other knwon source) in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Kind of reminds me of an arrangement of Ginko biloba leaves.

Peter

[canonian]

Very nice image Peter, never before I saw desmid captured in amber.

This afternoon I read your post and the shape reminded me of something I've seen before.
Could not remember where and when however, until a moment ago it occured to me.
I saw similar shapes on the coating of a very cheap lens I bought on a fleamarket.

EDIT: I dismantled the lens and discovered these shapes form between two cemented lenses and not on the coating

[Ernst Hippe]

Hallo,
I talked to a leading expert on desmids and he refused to acknowledge this as a Micrasterias. Their symmetry would be different from it. So it seems that it's an artefact similar to that shown by canonian.
Ernst

[Wim van Egmond]

I also doubt that it is a Micrasterias but I don't think it is a lens artefact. Were there more organisms in the amber? When I look at the focus and out of focus areas and the way the egde looks it does look like an empty cell wall of something. Perhaps some kind of seed? What is the size?

Wim

[Choronzon]

It does look strangely like cement seperation observed many times in lens elements cemented with Canadian Balsam. Is this specimen perhaps from Canada?
Seriously, I think you're observing the void left by ancient fungal or bacterial growth.