Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it disappears. Valviloculus pleristaminis make a perfect example.
Scientists have only recently identified this mysterious, extinct flower. It once flourished during the Cretaceous – a floral relic of yesteryear, preserved in amber that stopped in time, on a nameless day, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
“This isn’t really a Christmas flower, but it’s a beauty, especially since it was part of a forest that existed 100 million years ago,” says Professor George Poinar Jr., a professor at State University. from Oregon.
Poinar Jr. is something of an authority on the amber’s time-capsule capabilities.
The octogenarian entomologist is widely regarded as the scientist who popularized the phenomenon that prehistoric insects and nematodes are trapped in tree resin on geological time scales – ideas that took flight, literally much of the time, in the fantasy of pop culture Jurassic Park.
(George Poinar Jr./OSU)
This lifelong focus began decades ago, but Poinar Jr.’s academic output is still prodigious. In recent years, he has described ancient, obsolete ticks, discovered new insect life orders, traced the origins of malaria, and found a fair share of forgotten flowers.
V. pleristaminis, which represents both a new genus and a species of flowers, is among the newest in this ever-expanding bouquet.
“The male flower is small, about 2 millimeters wide, but has about 50 stamens arranged like a spiral, with the anthers facing the sky,” explains Poinar.
“Despite being so small, the details that remain are still astonishing. Our specimen was probably part of a bunch on the plant that contained many similar flowers, some probably female.”
The specimen in question was obtained from amber mines in Myanmar, being preserved in marine sedimentary deposits dating back to the middle of the Cretaceous, about 99 million years ago.
(George Poinar Jr./OSU)
According to researchers, V. pleristaminis, an example of an angiosperm (flowering plant), probably belongs to the order Laurales, especially similar to the families Monimiaceae and Atherospermataceae.
But this strange, extinct flower does not only provide clues about the history of floral evolution.
According to Poinar Jr., V. pleristaminis and other Burmese amber angiosperm fossils, such as this one, can also help solve a remarkable mystery about the Gondwana supercontinent from which these plants first appeared.
Specific, V. pleristaminis it would have once flourished on a piece of Gondwana called the West Burma Bloc, which broke with the rest of the supercontinent at an unknown time in history.
When it is a matter of debate, some geological hypotheses date the separation 500 million years ago.
Research by Poinar Jr. suggests, however, that the West Burma bloc could not have sailed from Gondwana to Asia before the early Cretaceous, given that angiosperms evolved and diversified only about 100 million years ago.
The debate probably won’t end soon, but V. pleristaminis and its amber-covered genus offers a new line of thought in this regard – a budding secret waiting to be told for nearly 100 million years.
“Meeting with [the West Burma Block] Gondwana’s tectonic migration is not yet well established, but the 100 Ma age of amber, with its fossils of plants and animals linked to the southern hemisphere, may contribute to a possible solution to this problem, “the researchers write.
The findings are reported in Journal of the Texas Institute of Botanical Research.