Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. Valviloculus pleristaminis making for a perfect example.
It is only recently that scientists have named the mysterious flower, extinct. It once grew in the Cretaceous period – a floral monument from a bygone age, preserved in amber that stopped time from some unnamed day when dinosaurs were still moving on Earth.
“This is not a Christmas flower but it is a beauty, especially since it was part of a forest that existed 100 million years ago,” says professor emeritus George Poinar Jr. of Oregon State University .
Poinar Jr. is something of an authority over time-capsule-esque amber capabilities.
The octogenarian entomologist is widely regarded as the scientist who enjoyed the wonder of prehistoric insects and nematodes being trapped in a tree resin over geological time zones – ideas that took flight, literally many of the time, in the fantasy of pop culture Jurassic Park.
(George Poinar Jr./OSU)
This lifelong focus began decades ago, but the academic result of Poinar Jr. still sensible. In the last few years he has described old bricks, discovered new orders about the life of insects, discovered the origin of malaria, and discovered his fair share of forgotten flowers.
V. pleristaminis, which represents both a new genus and a floral genre, are among the newest in this ever-growing bouquet.
“The male flower is tiny, about 2 millimeters across, but has about 50 stamens arranged like a spiral, with anthers pointing towards the sky,” Poinar explains.
“Despite being so small, the detail is still remarkable. Our sample may have been part of a group on the plant that contained many similar flowers, some possibly female.”
This sample was obtained from amber mines in Myanmar, having been preserved in marine sediment deposits dating back to central Cretaceous, about 99 million years ago.
(George Poinar Jr./OSU)
According to the researchers, V. pleristaminis, an example of angiosperm (a flowering plant), apparently belonging to the order Laurales, particularly similar to the families of Monimiaceae and Atherospermataceae.
But this exotic flower is not extinct just by considering the evolutionary history of flowers.
According to Poinar Jr., V. pleristaminis and other Burmese angiosperm amber fossils as if to help unravel a unique mystery about the ancient Gondwana superstructure from which these plants first came.
In particular, V. pleristaminis it would once flourish on a piece of Gondwana called the West Burma Bloc, which broke away from the rest of the overlord at some point in history.
Well when is it a matter of debate, with some geological theories dating the date of separation as far back as 500 million years ago.
Research by Poinar Jr., however, reveals that the West Burma Block could not have been rafted from Gondwana to Asia too early Cretaceous, as angiosperms only grew and multiplied about 100 million years ago. back.
The debate is not likely to end any time soon, however V. pleristaminis and its amber-covered ilk gives us a new way of thinking about the matter – a new mystery that has been waiting to be revealed for nearly 100 million years.
“Date [the West Burma Block] Tectonic migration from Gondwana is not yet firmly established, but the age of 100 Ma of amber, with the fossils of plants and animals associated with the Southern Hemisphere, may include a final solution to this problem, “the researchers write.
The results are reported in Journal of the Texas Botanical Research Institute.