100 million year old flower intact as if just picked

Seven flowers perfectly preserved in 100-million-year-old amber in Myanmar, knocked off the tree by a passing Tyrannosaurus rex.

The flower was preserved intact in amber for 100 million years. Photo: University of Oregon.

Researchers found a block of transparent amber in Myanmar containing seven tiny flowers measuring between 3.4 and 5 mm wide, Phys.org reported on August 15. The intact flowers are believed to belong to a species of rain forest flower with few petals that existed 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.

According to the team, this is the largest collection of flowers from this period ever analyzed. They said the flowers looked as if they had been freshly picked, despite hundreds of millions of years having passed since the fossils were formed.

"Amber preserves flower parts so well that they look like they were just picked from a garden. Dinosaurs would have brushed against the branches, causing the flowers to fall off and stick to the resin in the bark of the pine tree. This resin then fossilized and became amber," said George Poinar Jr, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, USA.

The Kauri pine is related to the kauri pine that grows today in New Zealand and Australia. The kauri pine secretes a special resin that can survive all weather conditions.

All seven flowers in the amber had calyxes that radiated in all directions. Based on this feature, they were named Tropidogyne pentaptera (T. pentaptera), using the Greek words for five (penta) and wing (pteron). The researchers compared the flowers to another species called Tropidogyne pikei (T. pikei), also recently discovered in amber, and found several remarkable features.

"The new flower has a broad, reticulated calyx, a nectar disc, and an internally grooved ovary like T. pikei. But the difference lies in the two carpels, along with the long, slender shape, and the grooves in the ovary do not have a dark rim like T. pikei," said Professor Poinar Jr.

T. pentaptera and T. pikei are both classified in the family Cunoniaceae, the tree family that still exists today.

The 100-million-year-old flowers also bear a striking resemblance to an Australian tree called the coachwood tree, which grows more than 36 meters tall and lives for centuries, but is found more than 6,400 kilometers away in Myanmar.

According to VNE