Divergent tales of two lizards where one ended up in amber and the other in a bowl of sambar

Fossils encased in amber are highly prized not only by palaeontologists but possibly even more by jewellery aficionados. And those amber pieces that contain identifiable fossils are even more sought after.

Not many know that these rare gems are the result of flora and fauna slipping millions of years ago into pools of a sap-like resin that hardened to become translucent shrouds.

The recent retraction of a paper published by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences after admitting the amber-enclosed creature they found in Myanmar and had posited as a hummingbird-sized dinosaur was actually a lizard brings to mind the discovery of another one — caused by a similar inadvertent slip — in a bowl of sambar by a diner at a Delhi restaurant last week.


Of course, the first one lived long before the advent of Homo sapiens and the other was probably used to living right alongside them. Their ends were much the same — only half of their bodies were espied in both cases — but the wildly divergent reactions to their discovery underlines the importance of context.

Perhaps house lizards immortalised in our lifetime in some resinous substance will be hailed rapturously millennia from now by scientists and jewellery connoisseurs alike. But the person who found one ensconced in his sambar certainly deserves recompense.