In the home of Ni, a native of New Suzhou, there is a special space for insects. In the corner of the living room, there are colorful insect specimens, and there are all kinds of insect paintings in the studio.

An unremarkable piece of amber completely subverted Ni's life. 20 17, she began to try. So far, in less than three years, she has worked hard to explore the amber insect restoration painting and become the first person in this field.

"The first time I painted insects was in 20 17." Ni recalled that after she joined a foundation composed of insect lovers and biologists on 20 15, she was very interested in preserving intact creatures in amber, and gradually sprouted the idea of painting, hoping to show these sealed primitive life forms in detail through brushes.

"20 17 is the year when I painted the most insects. I spend most of my time drawing insects except work and sleep every day. I vaguely remember that the amber insect I painted for the first time was a bug, a bug 99 million years ago, which changed my life. Because of this, I began to draw all kinds of insects in amber.

Some are extinct and some are common. Ni told reporters that some scholars who study insect biology have been looking for her to draw the restoration map of amber insects, and formally embarked on the road of scientific painters. At present, she is the only person who paints amber insects in China.

The insect restoration map is different from the general painting. She said that the restoration map requires a very high degree of reduction of the original form of insects. It sometimes takes several months to draw a restored picture, and the details need to be revised and adjusted repeatedly. "Insect amber is often mixed with many impurities, the amber body is vague, and many amber are damaged and cracked.

Moreover, the insects preserved in it are generally small, so it is difficult to see insects as big as scorpions, which makes it more difficult to observe and describe the details of insects. Ni said that scholars are very familiar with the proportion, structure and shape of the painted insects, and they need to be adjusted repeatedly if they are slightly different.

There is a cicada with a broken wing in Ni's works. "This is a wax cicada 1 100 million years ago. Only about 1cm, which is relatively large in wax cicadas. " Ni told reporters that this wax cicada is a brand-new group discovered by Dr. Song of Jiangsu Second Normal University-Ceratopogonidae.

God wax cicada comes from Myanmar, and in Myanmar folk myths and legends, it is the benevolent patron saint of treasures buried under big trees. Related papers were also published in the internationally renowned geological magazine Cretaceous Research, which is a self-made map. In this amber, besides wax cicadas, there are prehistoric cockroaches and aphids.