A tropical flower embedded in amber was found 30 years ago and studied by US scientists. George Poinar, of Oregon State University, and Lena Struwe of Rutgers University, report in the publication Nature Plants on this trophy from a distant past.
The delay in the report was that while Professor Poinar brought back 500 fossil samples from the amber mine after a field trip in 1986, it took him a while to work his way through the insects before he got around to the flowers. “The flowers looked as though they had just fallen from a tree,” he said.
“The fossil turned out to have particular significance for our understanding of the evolution of plants in the Caribbean and the New World tropics,” Prof Struwe said. The flower is estimated to be more than 30 million years old.
Scientists say that the perfectly intact flower fossil named Strychnos electri is closely linked to modern daisies, mints and tomatoes.
Struwe observed: “The discovery of this new species in a 30-year-old amber collection highlights that we still have many undiscovered species hidden away in natural history collections worldwide and not enough taxonomic experts to work through them. Strychnos electri has likely been extinct for a long time, but many new species living, and unfortunately, soon-to-be-extinct species are discovered by scientists every year.”
The discovery is expected to assist scientists to determine how major evolutionary groups of flowering plants spread across the globe.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/15/fossilised-flower-beautiful-deadly-new-to-science-strychnos-electri
http://www.nature.com/articles/nplants20165
