User talk:Rosanicole

Baltic amber
May I ask the relevance of the section you keep trying to add to Baltic amber? Baltic amber is consistently shown in modern evaluations to be from either Pinus or Sciadopitys relatives, see here. The two references you us in your section are woefully out of date, and not relevant to the Baltic amber materials.-- Kev min  § 19:17, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

The study(ies) highlighted connect the Baltic Amber to one variety of Pinus (pinus halepensis). Rather than using some similarity concept between actual resins and old fossils, the articles show how the Pinus' resin can chemically transform itself into Amber. Transformation occurs under suitable and plausible conditions such as floating in water during millions of years.

As such, the relevance with respect to the Baltic Amber entry is as follows:


 * 1) It integrates and clarifies a missing (and most likely incorrect) reference in the entry. "[...] but research in the 1980s [missing reference] came to the conclusion that the resin originates from several species." This is probably not true, chemical research in the 80s actually clarified the relationship between Pinus and Baltic Amber.
 * 2) It provides a reference for the Pinus. As you say "Baltic amber is consistently shown in modern evaluations to be from either Pinus or Sciadopitys relatives". But this is not what the entry supports. The entry indeed provides no cited evidence for the Pinus, but only one for the Sciadopitys.
 * 3) It challenges an approach such as that is based on comparisons between actual resins and the fossils, because resins are subject to chemical transformations.

Finally, I am not sure what 'woefully' outdated means. In spite of being shown (in top field journals some 30 years ago) that a compound can transform into another, non-chemical research keeps on addressing the problem by showing non-fully relevant comparisons between actual resins and fossils.

I understand progress of the body of knowlegde the ultimate goal of Wikipedia and not chasing the most 'updated sources'. --Rosanicole (talk) 17:51, 28 December 2015 (UTC)