You don’t know what you’ve got until you leave. Valviluculus pleristaminis Makes a perfect example.
Scientists have recently identified this mysterious, extinct flower. It once bloomed in the Cretaceous period – the remains of a Purana-era flower, preserved in time-suspended amber from some unnamed days while dinosaurs were still roaming the earth.
“This isn’t quite a Christmas flower, but it’s a beauty, especially considering it was part of a forest that existed 100 million years ago,” says George Poiner Jr., an Emeritus professor at Oregon State University.
Poiner Jr. is something on the power of Amber’s time-capsule-esque ability.
The octogenarian entomologist is widely regarded as a scientist who popularized the occurrence of prehistoric insects and nematodes trapped in tree resins over geological periods – ideas that flew, literally, in time, in the imagination of pop culture. Jurassic Park.
(George Poiner Jr. / USU)
This lifelong meditation began decades ago, but the academic output of Ponar Jr. is still enormous. In recent years he has described ancient, engrossed ticks, discovered new orders of insect life, traced the origins of malaria, and found his fair share of forgotten flowers.
V. Pleristaminis, Which represents both a new genus and a species of flower, this is always the latest in the expanding bouquet.
“The male flower is small, about 2 millimeters long, but has about 50 stamens arranged in a circular shape, with the anthers pointing toward the sky.”
“Despite being so small, the rest of the detail is still surprising. Our specimen was probably part of a cluster on a plant that had many identical flowers, some possibly female.”
A sample of the query was obtained from the Amber Mines in Myanmar, preserved in a collection of ocean sediments from the Cretaceous to the Middle Cretaceous approximately 99 million years ago.
(George Poiner Jr. / USU)
According to researchers, V. Pleristaminis, An example of angiosperm (flowering plant), most closely resembling the families Monimiaceae and Atherospermataceae, belongs to the order of Lau Rails.
But this exotic, extinct flower does not just provide clues about the evolutionary history of flowers.
According to Poiner Jr., V. Pleristaminis And other Burmese amber angiosperm fossils like it can also help solve the mystery about the ancient supernatant gondwana from where these plants first originated.
Especially, V. Pleristaminis Gondwana would have once flourished known as the West Burma Block, which broke away from the rest of the continent at some unknown place in history.
While some are the subject of debate, some geological hypotheses date the separation to million million years ago.
Although research by Pinar Jr. suggests that the West Burma block could not have rafted from Gondwana to Asia before the early Cretaceous, only angiosperms evolved and diversified about 100 million years ago.
The discussion is not likely to happen any time soon, however V. Pleristaminis And its amber-coated elk offers a new line of thinking about the matter – an emerging mystery that has been waiting to be told for almost 100 million years.
“Dating [the West Burma Block] “The tectonic migration from Gondwana has not yet been definitively established, but the 100th era of amber, which includes the remains of flora and fauna related to the Southern Hemisphere, could lead to a final solution to this problem,” the researchers wrote.
These findings are reported Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas.
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