Identify true and false bugs

The insect amber is a natural amber containing bubbles, plants, and other inclusions, and its value is extremely precious. In the market, the imitation of natural amber is endless, and the area where falsification is the most common and the highest level of counterfeiting technology is often the production area of ​​some amber. The pseudo-history of insects in the Baltic Sea can be traced back hundreds of years, often in the form of family workshops, and reached a peak in the early 20th century. True amber only softens during heating, it is difficult to completely melt into liquid, and it is difficult to artificially add inclusions. There are still a large number of fake insects from China and India on the market, but they are often rough and easy to identify.

1. Amber All amber tests apply to wormwood. To identify worms, you must first identify its "skin", which is the material used to enclose the contents. Since true amber is difficult to completely melt into a liquid, and the worms that are added in the pressed amber are very severely deformed under high temperature and high pressure, the falsification of amber is generally used as an alternative to amber, such as a hard resin, and the other. It is pseudo-permanent plastic. Hard resin is a kind of plant resin. It differs from amber in that the hard resin is easily soluble in **. If a drop of ** is added to the hard resin, it will be softened and sticky when rubbed by hand, but amber will not have this. This phenomenon. The difference between imitation plastic and wormwood is that the density of the plastic is large, it sinks in saturated salt water, while the insect worm floats; with a sharp knife can cut the plastic into small pieces, and amber can not be cut into small pieces, a knife Touch is broken; with a hot needle touching the plastic, you can smell the pungent pungent, and amber is a fragrant taste.

2. Changes in Inclusions Contents have undergone many changes over thousands of years, the most important being dehydration, decolorization, and decomposition of internal tissues. Dehydration is not very obvious for insects with a chitinous shell, but for organisms such as frogs, the changes are obvious. Except for a few coleopteran insects, the pigments of most of the contents are decomposed, so if you see colorful contents, it must be false.

3. Types of Inclusions The identification of inclusion species requires a great deal of knowledge and experience. It is almost impossible for the average Insect Pacifier to judge with the naked eye in a short time. Some creatures seem ordinary, but they are rare in amber. Blood-sucking mosquitoes and fleas are good examples. They usually move around animals and rarely come close to amber, so they are rare in amber. If you find that some rare species are being sold at very ordinary prices, be careful. Second, because organisms living near the amber tree have a greater chance of contact with the resin, in general, eating meat is less common than vegetarian, and parasites are even rarer.

4. Observe the flow of the resin to see if traces of "resin flow" can be observed. Most of the contents are first adhered by a layer of resin, and then covered by freshly dripping resin. A natural interface is formed between two different resins, and the contents, especially the insects , it is often on this interface. This is not a hard indicator, but it can assist your judgment.

5, the size of the inclusion of large animals can easily escape from the resin, so generally only small creatures will be wrapped in resin and preserved. Common inclusions are only a few millimeters long, and creatures larger than one centimeter are rare, and more than two centimeters are rarer. The insects in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London are only about two centimeters in content. Sometimes the contents of lizards can reach five or six centimeters, which is almost the limit of inclusions. The size of the inclusions largely determines the price of worms.

6, there are some other experience can also be used to reference the authenticity of insects, but not completely reliable. The insects in the worms are stiff and their limbs are stretched. The worms in the worms are often struggling, and their limbs contract. Fake worms rarely add less than a millimetre in size because they are difficult to handle. Generally false worms rarely contain bubbles. In general, insects in amber have long antennae, and species with short antennae are relatively rare; insects in copa- and modern resins are generally shorter.