A new flower from 100 million years ago brings a fresh holiday beauty in 2020

Researchers at Oregon State University have identified a spectacular new genus and species of flowers from the Middle Cretaceous period, a male specimen whose sunbeam reached the skies was frozen during Burmese amber.

“It’s not really a Christmas flower, but it’s a beauty, especially since it was part of a forest that existed 100 million years ago,” said George Poinar Jr., professor emeritus at OSU College. of Science.

The findings were published in Journal of the Texas Institute of Botanical Research.

“The male flower is small, about 2 millimeters wide, but has about 50 stamens arranged like a spiral, with the anthers facing the sky,” said Poinar, an international expert in the use of plant and animal life forms preserved in amber. to learn more about the biology and ecology of the distant past.

A stamen consists of an anther – the pollen-producing head – and a filament, the stem that connects the anther to the flower.

“Despite being so small, the remaining details are amazing,” Poinar said. “Our specimen was probably part of a group on the plant that contained many similar flowers, some probably female.”

The new discovery has an empty flower cup in the shape of an egg – the part of the flower from which the stamens emanate; an outer layer of six petal-like components known as tepals; and two-chambered anthers, with pollen sacs that open through laterally articulated valves.

Poinar and collaborators from OSU and the US Department of Agriculture named the new flower Valviloculus pleristaminis. The valve is the Latin term for the leaf on a folding door, loculus means compartment, plerus refers to many, and staminis reflects dozens of male sexual organs of the flower.

The flower became amber-wrapped on the old Gondwana supercontinent and floated on a continental plate about 4,000 miles across the ocean, from Australia to Southeast Asia, Poinar said.

Geologists debated just when this piece of land – known as the West Burma bloc – broke away from Gondwana. Some believe it was 200 million years ago; others claim it was more than 500 million years ago.

Numerous angiosperm flowers have been discovered in Burmese amber, most of them described by Poinar and a colleague from Oregon, Kenton Chambers, who also collaborated on this research.

Angiosperms are vascular plants with stems, roots and leaves, with eggs that are fertilized and grow inside the flower.

Because angiosperms evolved and diversified only about 100 million years ago, the West Burma bloc could not have broken away from Gondwana before, said Poinar, which is much later than data suggested by geologists.