captured in amber.

A hurricane had savaged the forest of giant Hymenaea trees along a Central American coastline.Tectonic movements eventually lifted the coastline into steep mountains 3,000 feet high, to become the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. Wandering in those hills some years ago, a Dominican miner came across a small landslide that revealed a black vein of fossilized wood. Since that study, DNA has been reported from a Drosophila fruit fly, a stingless bee, a wood gnat, a fungus gnat, and tree leaf and chrysomelid beetles, all preserved in Dominican amber. In 2001, working with Lynn Margulis and Michael Dolan of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, my laboratory unearthed microscopic remains of symbiotic protists and bacteria-like spirochetes in the gut of an extinct termite.