Now Lieberman is a 17-year-old senior at Denver Academy.
Michalski, a family friend, was dining with the Liebermans in August 2000 and mentioned he would be looking for petrified wood in Highalnds Ranch that weekend and Andrew asked to join him.
They went to a location along Wildcat Reserve Road near Daniels Park Road and Lieberman saw some petrified wood jutting from a bulldozed embankment.
"His eyes are lots better than mine," said Michalski.
He then took the pieces back to the USGS lab in Lakewood and cut them with a diamond saw to reveal amber, which is extremely rare.
Petrified wood is not uncommon, but there are only about half a dozen other specimens of fossil wood with amber found anywhere, Michalski said.
More than two dozen researchers were enlisted to study and verify the sample.
"Amber in this petrified wood -- which has only been found in New Jersey, Germany and the Baltic Sea -- disproves an earlier theory that amber could only come from the sweetgum and its broad-leafed family," Michalski said.
"This amber has been confirmed to have come from a juniper, a cone-bearing tree. So we now know that sweetgums, sycamores and their families -- along with junipers -- grew in what other findings show was a semitropical climate at the time," he said.
/>
