JEWELLERY COLLECTIONS / DANISH JEWELLERY REPORT
NEWLY ACQUIRED AMBER COLLECTION HIDES NEW SPECIES
WINDOWS TO THE PAST By STATENS NATURHISTORISKE MUSEUM
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p. 103 36 –2019
kilometres from my home. I exchange my amber pieces with inclusions with other collectors for beautiful beach amber! In 1996 I had 30.000 inclusions, and three foundations had been paying a salary to a Ph.D. student for the whole year to classify my collection. Among the possessed 4.000 pieces, most of them were holotypes. I continued collecting only inclusions partly found by myself, and some of them were bought from other collectors. For 40 years, I haven’t sold a single inclusion. I had a lot of good offers. And when I decided to sell all of them, there were almost 60.000 amber pieces with inclusions in my collection. All of them were Baltic amber pieces! Over the whole period of collecting, I was convinced that my collection should stay in Denmark for a research! I had a few good offers from China and Indonesia, but the University of Copenhagen helped me with payment from foundations in my country. I appreciate that. The inclusion collection is now safe in Denmark, and I wish that scientists enjoyed studying my collection in the future! Once you have become a collector, you will always be a collector. I keep on collecting amber! Now I am passionate about antique 100-years-old Danish amber jewellery, and I have already got very nice samples of it. Amber still takes me up!” ■
B A LT I C J E W E L L E R Y N E W S
Photo: Karin Nordmann with grandson Noah in Copenhagen. The day when the collection was delivered to the Zoological Museum
One of the World's largest private collections of Baltic amber is being acquired by the National Museum of Natural History at the University of Copenhagen. The collection of nearly 60,000 amber pieces was built up during 40 years by the former owner Karin Nordmann Ernst. The collection has great scientific value because many of the pieces contain insect fossils and other biological material, e.g., parts of plants. The pieces of amber therefore function as small windows to the beetle population of the past, and the Museum's researchers expect that the amber pieces store entirely new species, which have not previously been described by science.
Beetle caught in Baltic amber. Photo: Anders DAMGAARD
It
is thanks to the support of the Augustinus Foundation, the Knud Højgaard Foundation and the VILLUM FOUNDATION that the Natural History Museum acquires Karin Nordmann Ernst's impressive amber collection. It brings great joy to the Museum, which already has an amber collection consisting of approx. 10,000 pieces. Baltic amber was formed approx. 35–40 million years ago in then widespread forests that covered much of the current Northern Scandinavia. Over time, insects and other biological material were trapped in the resin that ran out of the trees – presumably, a form of pine trees. And because the resin
subsequently solidified and became amber – a process that has taken millions of years – we can today admire and study these encapsulated animals from the past. Those animals that were caught and preserved in the amber constitute especially a partly representative sample of the insect fauna from that time, says lecturer and curator Lars Vilhelmsen from the National Museum of Natural History and continues: Generally, the climate was warmer at that time – for example, there was no ice caps on any of the ⊲