Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. Valviloculus pleristaminis is a perfect example.
Scientists have only recently identified this mysterious, extinct flower. It once flourished in the Cretaceous Period – a floral relic from a bygone era preserved in timeless amber from an unnamed day when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
“This isn’t quite a Christmas flower, but it’s a beauty, especially considering that it was part of a forest that existed 100 million years ago,” said Professor Emeritus George Poinar Jr. from Oregon State University.
Poinar Jr. is a sort of authority on the time capsule-like capabilities of amber.
The eighty-year-old entomologist is widely regarded as the scientist who popularized the phenomenon of prehistoric insects and nematodes trapped in tree resin across geological time scales – ideas that literally took flight much of the time in the pop culture fantasy of Jurassic Park.
(George Poinar Jr./OSU)
This lifelong focus began decades ago, but Poinar Jr.’s academic output is still wonderful. In recent years he has described old, swollen ticks, discovered new orders of insect life, traced the origins of malaria and found many of the forgotten flowers.
V. pleristaminisrepresenting both a new genus and a new flower species, is one of the newest in this ever-expanding bouquet.
“The male flower is small, about 2 millimeters wide, but has about 50 stamens that are arranged spirally, with anthers pointing towards the sky,” explains Poinar.
“Despite being so small, the details are still astonishing. Our specimen was probably part of a cluster on the plant that contained many similar flowers, some of which may be female.”
The specimen in question was obtained from amber mines in Myanmar and has been preserved in sedimentary deposits in the sea dating back to the mid-Cretaceous, about 99 million years ago.
(George Poinar Jr./OSU)
According to the researchers V. pleristaminis, an example of an angiosperm (flowering plant), probably belongs to the order Laurales, and is particularly similar to the families Monimiaceae and Atherospermataceae.
But this strange, extinct flower is not only clues to the history of the flower evolution.
According to Poinar Jr., V. pleristaminis and other Burmese amber angiosperm fossils like this one may also help solve a remarkable mystery about the ancient supercontinent Gondwana from which these plants first evolved.
Specifically, V. pleristaminis is said to have once blossomed on a chunk of Gondwana called the West Burma Block, which broke away from the rest of the supercontinent at an unknown point in history.
Virtually when is a matter of debate, with some geological hypotheses tracing the date of separation back to 500 million years ago.
Research by Poinar Jr. suggests, however, that the Western Burma Bloc could not have rafted from Gondwana to Asia before the early Cretaceous Period, as angiosperms only evolved and diversified about 100 million years ago.
The debate probably won’t be over anytime soon, though V. pleristaminis and its amber-colored kind offers a new way of thinking about the matter – a burgeoning secret that’s been waiting to be told for nearly 100 million years.
“The dating of [the West Burma Block] tectonic migration from Gondwana is not yet firmly established, but the 100 Ma age of the amber, with its included plant and animal fossils in the Southern Hemisphere, could play a role in a final solution to this problem, ” the researchers write .
The findings are reported in Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas.