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Journalists from the Daily Mail described the discovery as follows: “A rare flower finally reaches the sun, almost 100 million years after it bloomed.” It is a new species of angiosperm or flowering plant from the Cretaceous.
It was kept in a piece of amber found in Myanmar (no, officially called the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, known in Romanian as Burma; it is the second largest country in Southeast Asia). Nicknamed Valviloculus pleristaminis, it belongs to the laurel family and is related to the black-hearted sassafras found in Australia.
The spectacular findings of geologists
Myanmar and Australia are more than 4,000 miles from the ocean, but at the time this flower was encased in resin, they were part of a supercontinent known as Gondwanaland. The discovery of V. pleristaminis suggests that the continental fault separated from Gondwanaland much later than previously theorized.
“This isn’t really a Christmas flower, but it’s a beauty, especially since it was part of a forest that existed nearly 100 million years ago,” said George Poinar Jr., a paleontologist in OSU’s Department of Integrative Biology. “The male flower is small, about 2 millimeters wide, but has about 50 spirally arranged stamens, with the anthers facing the sky,” he added.
The discovery is similar to a miracle
Resistance is the part of the male flower that produces pollen, while the anther is the head of the stamen that produces pollen. “Despite being so small, the details that remain are staggering,” said Poinar, author of a report on the discovery in the Journal of the Texas Institute of Botanical Research.
He and his colleagues at OSU and the Department of Agriculture named the flower, which is both a new genus and a new species, Valviloculus pleristaminis. Loculus means “compartment”, plerus refers to “many” and staminis reflects the flower’s dozens of male sex organs.
The specimen was probably part of a group on a plant with similar flowers, Poinar added, “some probably female.” In addition to its beauty, the fossilized flower is noteworthy for its journey.
It flourished on the former supercontinent Gondwanaland and was surrounded by amber before taking a walk on a continental shelf known as the West Birma Block. That plate slowly moved from Australia to Southeast Asia during a 4,000-mile journey.
There are still many debates
There are ongoing debates as to when the West Burma Bloc broke away from Gondwanaland, which eventually split into Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, the Indian subcontinent, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Some geologists believe this happened 500 million years ago, while others theorize that it was more than 200 million years ago. But according to Poinar, angiosperms evolved and diversified only about 100 million years ago.
That means the West Burma bloc could not have been broken earlier, he said. Poinar is a world-renowned expert on the analysis of amber plants and animals, and his work has inspired Michael Crichton to write Jurassic Park.
In 2013, Poinar discovered a piece of amber with the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant, a group of 18 small flowers from the Cretaceous period. The time of the freezing frame includes microscopic tubes that grow from the pollen grains and enter the stigma, part of the flower’s female reproductive system.
What is amber?
Amber has been used in jewelry for thousands of years and is known for finding very well preserved materials from long ago. The golden translucent substance was formed when the resin of extinct conifers hardened and fossilized.
Insects, plants, pollen and other materials were trapped in the resin, causing its burial for millions of years.
source: dailymail.co.uk
