I realize this is rather off-topic from jewelry as investment, etc.. but, well, I'm indoors, bored, and it's -10F, so I thought I'd post something which is somewhat jewelry related. I happen to like pieces of amber and have a couple of pins -- nothing terrific and collectible, mind you. As you might well guess, I don't have much occasion to wear jewelry and usually don't. Anyhow, I belong to a newsgroup frequented by biologists who are into millipedes and centipedes, and recently, the topic of amber jewelry came up. Seems that there's quite a trade in pieces of amber with invertebrates in them -- especially good pieces with whole specimens which are often priced at over $1k. The biologists were lamenting how such pieces of amber are scientific treasures from the POV of sorting out invertebrate taxonomy, but that the pieces are being dispersed as jewelry so rapidly that nobody gets much of a chance to examine the insects, millipedes, centipedes, etc... that are entombed within the resin. I had never given this a lot of thought in the past, but you know, they're quite right. Almost seems like there should be some process for at least photographing pieces and registering them so that scientists could examine a piece if it were deemed significant.
Just some musing on a cold night.
(o: |
