It’s a bright sunny morning in Ain Dara, a village in central Lebanon. A two-lane road cuts its way through the hilly, rugged countryside. Dany Azar walks about a hundred feet down that road before he stops at a stone ledge, and prepares to ascend the embankment.
In part, the paleontologist chooses field sites like this one — near a roadway, close to civilization — to avoid having to traverse long distances by foot. “I’m a little bit lazy,” he says with a smile. But there’s another reason, too: Such a thoroughfare also cuts away the hillside to make its layers accessible.
“Let’s have a look,” Azar says, as he climbs upon the ledge. After a few paces, he steps onto the rise and makes his way up the steep and crumbly face. The air is cool and the cloudless sky is a deep blue.
Azar, who holds a joint position at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China and the Lebanese University, stares at the dirt and rocks before him. It doesn’t look like much — but he knows what he’s after. Before long, Azar stops.
Among the dirt and stones at his feet, he spots a piece of amber not much bigger than a grain of rice. Then he spots another, and another — shiny golden fragments glinting in the sunlight. “This is one of the 450 outcrops of amber that I discovered in this country,” says Azar, who’s originally from Lebanon.
He explains that Lebanon is one of the few places where it’s possible to study a critical moment in our planet’s evoluti.
