Palaeogen parcels

In Moscow, in a quiet place next to the Neskuchny Garden and the old building of the Academy of Sciences, there is a museum with a history unusually long for Russian museums - the A. E. Fersman Mineralogical Museum. Last year, he celebrated his 300th anniversary.

The fact is that the collection of this Academic Museum arose even earlier than the Academy itself, in 1716, as a collection of the mineral cabinet founded by Peter I Kunstkamers. Over the past centuries, the collection has grown significantly, became one of the largest in the world, and the museum itself in 1934, together with a number of other institutions of the Academy of Sciences, moved from the former capital to Moscow.

The basis of the collection, of course, is minerals. The rare and widespread, arising on our planet and flew from space, ore and jewelry, forming beautiful crystals and encountered in the form of nondescript films, smallest grains. But besides them, there is much more related to the stone - rocks, jewelry and stone -cutting work, including the most famous border of Russia, the legendary Faberge company.

Among the jewelry, crafts collected in the museum collection, there are those that are not among the minerals (according to modern ideas - natural crystalline formations). One of them is now becoming increasingly popular amber. The Mineralogical Museum has a large collection of amber and products from it (Fig. 1). Amber and fossil resins similar to him here are not only from the Baltic states, but also from Ukraine, Siberia, Primorye, Sakhalin, the Czech Republic, Italy, Algeria, Mozambique, New Zealand, Central America.

This year, the museum also showed and now shown the unique patterns of amber from other collections. At the beginning of the year, visitors could see a selection from the funds of the famous Kaliningrad Museum of amber, and during the summer the exhibition “captured by amber. Myths and legends ”with exhibits representing one of the best private collections in Russia, collected by Viktor Anatolyevich Gusakov.

The first samples of amber fell into the collection of the museum (Mineral Council of the Kunstkamer) back in the 18th century. An employee of the cabinet who described the incoming materials, these samples inspired the poem:

In the Topolev shadow walking, ant
In a sticky resin, his foot was bogged down.
Although he had his despicable people in life,
Upon death in amber, they became precious.

Find out? Well, yes, the stanzas of Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov. A little later, in his work “On the Layers of the Earth”, he poetically described the emergence of “inclusive” - the inclusion of animals in the amber - from their own name:

“Using the summer with warmth and the radiance of the sunny, we walked along the plants luxurious moisture, searched and collected everything that served as our food; They were delighted with the pleasantness of the well-being, and following different incense spirits, crawled and flew along herbs, sheets and trees, without fear of any misfortune from them. And so we sat on the liquid tar out of the trees, which tied us with stickiness, captivated, and constantly pouring out and made it sustained. Then, from the earthquake, the forest that descended down our place with a resulting sea was covered: the trees were refuted, covered with silt and sand, with a purchase with resin and with us; Where long time mineral juices penetrated the resin, they gave a lot of firmness, and in a word to amber, they were implemented, in which we got tombs more magnificent than noble and rich people can have ... "

The amazing selection of “inclusive” can now be seen in the Mineralogical Museum at the exhibition of the Baltic amber from the collection of Viktor Gusakov. Looking at them, you can feel younger for 45 million years, feel yourself in the forest of the Paleogene period.

This forest in our opinion is very unusual. First of all, he grew up not at all on those sea coasts where the “sun stone” is now found, but much north, on the territory of present -day Sweden, partly on the site of the current Baltic Sea. The amber deposits in the Baltic streams formed in the Baltic streams, which have passed it a long distance (amber from the same forests is found even in Belarus and Ukraine).

Amber trees with their cones, needles preserved in amber (Fig. 2) resembled pines, but were not at all the pines that grow today. In addition, amber was formed from the resin of trees of several species. In addition to the pines in these forests, oaks, beeches, maples, ashs, platans, laurels and magnolia grew. In the undergrowth of the amber forest, many palm trees grew, including banana. And the most unusual appearance to the forest was given by giants rising above it to a height or more meters - sequoia (Fig. 3). Maybe in many years our edges will look like, if suddenly global warming is not a myth.

The idea of ​​the life of the amber forest of the inclusion of insects and other small animals, which are presented at the exhibition from the collection of Victor Gusakov, is even more revived. In recent years, new types of beetles, OS, and even a new family of curses have been opened and described from this meeting. Amber retains its sacrifices so well that after tens of millions of years we can look into the blue eyes of the ancient insect, see the scope of his thin, openwork wings (Fig. 4).

He retained amber and such fleeting moments of the ancient history of the Earth, like traces of dew that fell on the web. If you look at this sample under a microscope, you can see the bubbles with a drop of moisture, which were scandalized here, possibly a kind of foggy morning in the middle of the Paleogene. There are many in it and those who wove the web in the dusk of the amber forest (Fig. 5).

There are in amber “premises” from the Paleogene, including those who are now in the Mineralogical Museum, and that which is not yet recognized and only waits for its researchers, such as this education (Fig. 6), in which experts suspect a representative of myxmiticates - organisms close to mushrooms and bacteria.

Mikhail Generalov,
The main keeper of the Mineralogical Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences

We invite you to the Mineralogical Museum! He is located at: Moscow, Leninsky Ave., 18, bldg. 2 (m. "Leninsky Prospekt" or "October"). Opening hours: from 11 to 17, except Monday and Tuesday. Tel. For certificates: (495) 954-39-00, site: www.fmm.ru.