Short answers, pulled from the story.
Amber is fossilized tree resin. High pressures and temperatures from overlying sediment transform the resin first into copal, then sustained heat and pressure drive off terpenes to produce amber. The process requires the original resin to resist decay from sunlight, rain, microorganisms, and extreme temperatures.
The English word amber derives from Arabic, tracing back through Middle Persian, Middle Latin, and Middle French. It originally referred to ambergris, a waxy substance from sperm whales. By the early 15th century, English had extended the word to cover Baltic fossil resin, and as the ambergris trade declined the fossil resin claimed the term entirely.
About 90% of the world's extractable amber is located in what is now the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, the area that was historically the coast west of Konigsberg in Prussia. Other important sources include Kachin State in northern Myanmar, the Rivne Oblast of Ukraine, and the Dominican Republic.
The oldest amber recovered dates to the late Carboniferous period. The oldest amber with arthropod inclusions comes from the Late Triassic of Italy, roughly 230 million years ago, containing four microscopic mites and a fly. Lebanese amber, at 125-135 million years old, contains the oldest known representatives of several families of terrestrial arthropods. Burmese amber from Myanmar dates to approximately 99 million years ago and has yielded descriptions of over 1,300 species.
The classical Greek name for amber was elektron, linked to a word meaning "beaming Sun." Because amber develops a static electric charge when rubbed, the word elektron was applied to that phenomenon, eventually giving rise to the words electric and electricity.
No. The premise of Michael Crichton's 1990 novel and Steven Spielberg's 1993 film adaptation, that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from blood in amber-trapped mosquitoes, remains scientifically impossible. No amber-trapped mosquito has ever yielded preserved blood. A 2013 study was unable to extract DNA from insects in much more recent Holocene copal, far younger than any dinosaur-era amber.