LOCUST’S WING IN ROCK

New Zealand Times, Volume LII, Issue 12211, 8 August 1925, Page 16

LOCUST’S WING IN ROCK

Three hundred feet below the surface in the Mount Eliot mine, in Queensland, the miners came on a piece of gypsum, as transparent as crystal. Enclosed within it was a perfectly preserved wing of a locust. Every detail, every vein of the wing was visible through the gypsum. Long ago Pope wrote of the hairs and grubs in amber:— “The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil they got there.” Amber is supposed to he a fossilised vegetable resin or gum,. The insects and other foreign substances found in it no doubt got into it when it was soft, and have been preserved in it when it hardened. The locust’s wing in the gypsum 300 ft beneath the earth is, however, a greater wonder than the grubs in amber. Think of the ages that must have passed since the insect lived ' and flew in an Australia very different to that of our day. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years would he required to cover this bit of gypsum with 300 ft of rook and soil. And yet the delicate tracery of the locust’s wing is as perfect as in that far-dis-tant. epoch when it enjoyed the sunshine. Insects are very ancient on the earth, but owing to their laok of hard, bonv parts their preservation in fossil form is a matter of lucky and comparatively rare accident. The

strange _ beasts and the stranger reptiles which flourished, in past geological ages, have been largely reconstructed from the hones which have been found in various deposits. Insects, however, have no skeletons. In some cases, as with 'the locust’s wing or the flies in amber, prehistoric insects have beoome embedded in soft material which has hardened round them, -and so saved the remains from destruction. In other instances the hard parts of insects have been saved in deposits. From such evidence it is known that cockroaches have come down without any great change from a very remote ■past, and the same is true of other kinds of insects. Deposits near Ipswioh. in Queensland, have, vielded traces of a rich insect fauna belonging to a remote past. It_ is not likelv that Queensland was speeiallv favoured’ with insects in the days when the world was young. It is simply as with the locust’s wing, from another part of Queensland,' that the remains h?.ve been preserved by unusually lucky conditions.