Some of these insects date as back as far as 130 million years, the time of the dinosaurs. The thing with specimens found in amber is that they're beautifully preserved. It's a sort of window on an ancient world. A lot of interest was generated in our amber collections by the film Jurassic Park. But specimens from the time of the dinosaurs are rare. Rarer still are insects that might have been able to bite through dinosaur skin and feed on its blood. There is one candidate possibly for something that might have fed on dinosaurs, and that's a sandfly. It's a 120 million-year-old insect from Burma. Before anyone could test such a rare specimen, one question needed answering. Could you even get insect DNA out of amber, let alone dinosaur DNA?


其中有些昆虫可以追溯到一亿三千万年前，也就是恐龙所生活的时代琥珀中样本的特点是它们都保存完好，是观察远古世界的窗户。 《侏罗纪公园》使得很多人对我们的琥珀收藏产生了兴趣，但恐龙时代的昆虫样本，本就稀有，而有昆虫能咬破恐龙皮肤吸食恐龙血的可能性就更小了。有种昆虫可能符合要求，它可能以恐龙血为食，那就是白蛉。 该生物生活在一亿两千万年前，源于东南亚。在测试稀有样本前，我们必须回答一个问题，先不管恐龙的DNA，可能从琥珀中提取昆虫的DNA吗？