If I put a bunch of amber and pearls in a treasure chest…what happens over a very long time? Let’s say there’s air circulation, but no temperature extremes. The treasure is in the deeps of a cavern. The chest they’re in is inert (not cedar or sandalwood…)
My descendants find my map 400 years later… Or 4,000 years…
(Inspired to ask by “The King’s Ankus” in Kipling’s Second Jungle Book, where, among the treasure, are seed pearls that have gone black and bad. Does that happen?)
The oldest fossil-bearing amber is 230 million years old, so that’s a pretty good bet to last 4000 years.
Pearls are less durable, but one has been found in a grave 7,500 years old.
I’m not sure if they turn black, but pearls can turn yellow with age from drying out.
Pearls are slightly water soluble and acids and other substances are even more destructive to them. Kept dry and clean they could last a very long time but in common use worn as jewelry they may only last a few decades. Skin oils and makeup are known to degrade them. This article says the oldest known pearl is over 7500 years old, nothing compared to 230 million year old amber mentioned above.
The article’s number is a bit off.
Well, wait, fossilization doesn’t count… It’s no longer “pearl” but some mineral that has taken the pearl’s place.
Still, I’m mighty impressed that amber is that doggone old! I had thought it would rot, or crumble, or dry out, or get brittle, or otherwise decay. Cool!
Didn’t you see the movie Jurassic Park (or read the book upon which it was based)? The story was based on the idea that usable DNA could be extracted from blood sucked out of dinosaurs by insects that were then preserved in amber. That requires that the amber be intact for millions of years.
Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.
There was some story I recall which included the bit that pearls dissolve in wine. (Alcohol? Acid?) IIRC the claim was extravagant ancient Romans put them in their wine to show off their wealth. Not sure if that was true.
Amber can decay if left out in the sun, with weather and such, it will get a haze or crust.
But that is only a thin layer. Amber jewelry or carved amber will be devalued, but not chunks or raw.
Also of interest is Jet a type of lignite a precursor to coal, and a gemstone.
Not in any good wine, no, but wine vinegar, yes:
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/miscellanea/cleopatra/cabanel.html
The article of course is referring to the oldest pearls associated with humans. It does look rather discolored.
As noted, fossil pearls have been converted to another mineral and are not actual pearls. In any case, since the pearls in the chest would not fossilize, this isn’t really relevant to the OP.
I’ve heard the same thing – but as noted above, it won’t work with just any old wine… I’ve also heard the same thing said of the ancient Romans…
But I may have read the same mystery story you did! The nice lady tried to smuggle the pearls in a bottle of wine, and her partners thought she was holding out on them when she couldn’t produce them! Oopsie!
(And I guess I’ve just committed the cardinal sin of giving away the ending of a mystery story. Sigh… Another century in Purgatory!)
From the link: “Occasionally the original aragonite is preserved with its nacreous luster.”
I have no fossil pearls, but I do have ammonite fossils that still have the original “mother of pearl.”
One of the *Saint *stories by Leslie Chateris. Also the basis for an episode of the Roger Moore TV series.
The Saint comes into possession of a stolen string of pearls. The Police are coming. He has to conceal the pearls quickly, or he will be arrested for the theft.
He tells Mr Police Detective the story about Cleopatra dissolving a pearl in wine for Caesar. He then points to the wine casserole he has been cooking. Policeman tiops out the casserole, and finds only the string remaining. Policeman leaves in disgust.
The Twist - the Saint tells the reader that pearls don’t really dissolve in wine. The pearls (minus string) were in his pocket all along.
Is that the story you saw, md2000?
What Darren said. Full preservation of the original material is a perfectly valid mode of fossilization (I too have ammonites with the nacreous layer).
You could do that nowadays if you wanted to. The highest grade of pearls are extremely expensive but even slight imperfections are a huge drop in price. The lowest grade pearls are just a few bucks a kilo in bulk.
The famous story told by Pliny is that Cleopatra, to show off her extravagance, put a pearl in vinegar, dissolved it, and drank it.
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/6868
As Stacey Schiff relates in her biography of Cleopatra (which I’ve just read, and as you can see from the above link), the account persuaded some researchers to test the theory. Pearls dissolve s-l-o-w-l-y in vinegar. If you want it dissolved in a short amount of time, you gotta grind it up. There’s a grain of truth to the story, as far as that goes, but if Mythbusters were still testing these things, they’d declare this one "busted’.
These two queries can be adduced from Dr. Deth’s excellent wrap-up in post #9.
Indeed, it is a critical plot point in Hamlet [spoilers ahead] as the King drops the poison in Hamlet’s drinking cup in a sleight of hand during a toast, covering his actions with an ostentatious “This union’s thine” as he drops it in.
For years I never understood that line. And now every so often when I’m cutting onions it pops up in my head.
Fossils that last a long time within their mineral matrix may still degrade when removed from it - I picked up a piece of fossilised wood on the beach this summer - it has washed out of the cliff that high tide - it was a section of tree trunk flattened into a thin blade of coal - oval in cross-section. Certainly millions of years old.
By the afternoon, it had cracked into pieces. The following day it was crumbling into dust.
Neither saw the movie nor read the book…but I was aware of that premise. The problem is, I was under the impression that really ancient amber was fossilized – i.e., wholly mineralized. I didn’t know it was still made up of the same original tree-sap molecules it formed from!
The idea was that the DNA of the plants and animals embedded in the amber was preserved. I haven’t kept up on the details but some of the ancient DNA recovered from amber samples turned out to be contamination.