Last week I waxed mildly poetic on the ephemeral nature of living beings and the inorganic reality of a fossil. Fossils are just shadows, I said, or memories … or something like that.

Well, this week I’ve got something much more exciting and less poetic. It’s an ancient pygmy grasshopper, Electrotettix attenboroughi, and it’s no rocky fossil, no sir. This is a genuine, mint condition, honest-to-God organic grasshopper, encased in a shiny amber shell and preserved for something like 20 m