As tree resin petrifies and turns into amber, it forms a golden time capsule preserving anything and everything it encases. Thanks to that fossilized tacky substance, we can study and admire the beauty of an ancient flower that’s more or less 35 million years old today.
Amber preservation
The usual fossilization process, from decay to compression, favors the conservation of sturdy materials like shells, bones, and teeth. However, amber, a fossilized tree resin, make preservation possible for more delicate organisms such as insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants.
Blobs of the hardened resin holds a window to the past, allowing scientists to reconstruct and know what flora and organisms thrived during prehistoric times. The region around the Baltic Sea, where a forest of resin-seeping conifer trees used to stand, is one of the world’s most prominent amber hotspots.
Among the fossil types, amber preservation is ideal for plants as it preserves in three dimensions, giving paleobotanists access to delicate features.
Unfortunately, plant inclusions in amber are a rare find. Only 1 to 3 percent of Baltic amber preserved organisms are botanical, possibly due to the unlikelihood of plants getting caught in sticky resin or the bias of amber collectors to prioritize finding fossilized animals over plants.
Largest amber-preserved prehistoric flower
Between 34 and 38 million years ago, during the late Eocene epoch, baltic amber coated the sizable, five-petal flower, forever preserving the blossom in its golden glory. The fossil was first discovered and documented in 1872 in what’s now known as Kaliningrad, Russia.
At the time, the flower was identified as an extinct ancient evergreen called Stewartia kowalewskii. It became part of the Berlin Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) museum collection.
For 150 years, the stunning fossil was left on display and unstudied until it caught the eye of postdoctoral researcher Eva-Maria Sadowski from the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde, the natural history museum of Berlin.
Dr. Sadowski heard of the prehistoric flower, officially known as specimen X4088, from a retired colleague. She was told that the flower was massive for an amber-preserved blossom, and Dr. Sadowski saw it with her own eyes.
Indeed, the amber-encased flower measured 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) across, about three times the size of similarly fossilized flowers. While its size may not seem particularly big, a flower with these proportions needs large amounts of resin to encase it, which adds to its rarity fully.
Prehistoric flower’s real identity revealed
With access to modern technology, Dr. Sadowski and Dr. Christa-Charlotte Hofmann from the University of Vienna took the opportunity to conduct a study to reexamine the fossilized flower. They had extracted and taken a closer look at the pollen grains under a scanning electron microscope and discovered them.
“Only under extremely high magnification can morphological details be recognized on the pollen grains, which are only a few micrometers in size,” Dr. Hoffman explains.
The shape of the pollen grains, which resembled inflated arrowheads, indicated that the flower had a mistaken identity. Contrary to being in the Stewartia genus, the prehistoric blossom belonged to the Asian representative of the genus Symplocos from the Symplocaceae family.
The prehistoric flower finds its newfound identity as the first record of the Baltic amber-preserved ancient Symplocos plant. Therefore, Dr. Sadowski and Hofmann propose to rename the blossom Symplocos kowalewskii.
In modern times, the evergreen trees and shrubs of the Symplocos genus can be found in humid forests with high altitudes. They produce white and yellow blossoms. Dr. Sadowski likens their discovery to an additional puzzle piece to understanding the past and decoding the flora of the Baltic Amber forest.
“Only with such insights can we gain deeper insights into the forests of the Earth’s history and understand their change over time,” she adds.
