Nearly 40 million years ago, a flower bloomed in a Baltic coniferous forest. Dripping tree resin enveloped the petals and pollen, forever displaying an ephemeral moment in our planet’s past.
Scientists have taken a fresh look at the only amber fossil, first documented in 1872 as belonging to a pharmacist named Kowalewski in what is now Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania.
The remarkable fossil was forgotten in the collection of the Berlin Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), according to Eva-Maria Sadowski, a postdoctoral researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde, the natural history museum in Berlin. Berlin, and author of the new study.
She said she had heard about the fossilized flower, officially known as specimen X4088, in passing from a retired colleague, which she thought was far-fetched.
“He told me that he once visited the BGR and that [ele] saw the biggest and most amazing amber flower in his collection. I didn’t know they had an amber collection. So I asked the collection curator if I could check it out – and there I found specimen X4088,” Sadowski said via email.
“I was more than surprised to see such a large flower inclusion.”
At 28 millimeters in diameter, it is the largest flower known to be fossilized in amber – three times the size of similar fossils.
Sadowski extracted and examined the pollen from the amber. She discovered that the flower had been misidentified when it was first studied.
“The original genus name of this specimen was Stewartia, from the plant family Theaceae. But we were able to show in our study that this was not correct, mainly based on pollen morphology. However, when the specimen was first studied in the 19th century, they did not discover or study pollen,” he said.
The flower is closely related to a genus of flowering plants common in Asia, known today as Symplocos – shrubs or trees bearing white or yellow flowers.
Originally called Stewartia kowalewskii, the authors propose a new name for the flower: Symplocos kowalewskii.
Amber fossils offer a tantalizing three-dimensional glimpse into the past. In addition to plants and flowers, a dinosaur tail, a crab, a hell ant, a spider and its young, a bird’s foot and a lizard’s skull were found buried in pieces of tree resin.
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday (12).
Source: CNN Brasil
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