After a rigorous battle with my local post office not letting me have the package and even going to said post office only for them to claim there were no forms for it, I finally managed to get my gift!

And holy shit!!!

Santa, you are a-freaking-mazing!! I literally cannot got enough of this beauty and I’m geeking out so much and I just wish, WISH, I had a better camera on hand because I left my field lenses at the damn museum, but holy damn! Damn! DAMN!!

So, I’m a paleontologist and I work on dinosaurs and their nesting sites and when I’m not doing that I’m teaching. Needless to say, I have a lot of love for my real work and I talk about it a lot with my students. But I have only ever mentioned getting something like this as a joke because I can’t justify buying myself one. So I started freaking out and my hands are still shaking from this! Santa got me a Baltic amber necklace that contains a nearly perfect mosquito preserved inside!!

I know the pictures I managed to take do NOT do this beauty justice! It’s so beautiful in general but as an amber specimen, it’s priceless to me; how much detail it managed to preserve delights and humbles me. It has ALL SIX legs intact as well as most of not all the wings! And for an insect that is approximately 45-50 million years old (deposited during the Lutetian of the Mid-Eocene) it is gorgeous!

Thank you, Secret Santa! I cannot thank you enough!!