Amber

Amber

Derivation: From "anbar" (Arabic) ambergris

Description: Glowing yellow or orange translucent blobs. Feels light, like plastic.

Amber is fossilized pine resin (from the amber pine) which oozes out of the trunk and then sets. When it is fossilized, it becomes amber. Often insects and other bits of stuff get trapped in the resin before it sets. In the film Jurassic Park it was suggested you could take a mosquito from a piece of amber, remove some dinosaur blood from the mosquito's stomach, extract the DNA from the blood, and clone a dinosaur. This is pretty much impossible, but in theory it seems plausible and makes a good story!