In Jurassic Park, amber fossils provided the key to bringing dinosaurs back to life. Here, the authors use amber for a similar act of revival - only they bring back an entire ecosystem. They reconstruct in words, drawings, and color photographs the ecosystem that existed on the island of Hispaniola between fifteen and forty-five million years ago.

The book is a beautifully written and produced homage to a remarkable, vanished world.

Preface i Acknowledgments xi
Prologue xiii
1. Introduction 3
From Where and Whence 3
Why Select Amber for Study? 8
How Biased Are Amber Samples? 9
Structure of Tropical Forests 11
2. The Amber Forest 13
The Plants 13
Plant-Feeding Insects 46
Aquatic Biota 87
Social Insects 97
Predators 129
Parasites and parasitoids 133
Vertebrates 153
3. Reconstruction of the Amber Forest169
General Conclusions 188
4. Amber Today 189
Handling, Photographing, and Preserving Amber 189
Amber Imitations and Forgeries 191
Tissue Preservation and Ancient DNA in Amber 193
Appendix A. Frequency of Organisms in Dominican Amber 197
Appendix B. Biota. in Dominican Amber 199
Chapter References 215
Index 229