Eva-Maria Sadowski, a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, didn’t have a particular agenda in mind when she decided to borrow the biggest fossil flower preserved in amber ever found.
But her curiosity pulled the thread of a more than 150-year-long case of mistaken identity, resulting in a clearer picture of what the Baltic amber forest of Northern Europe looked like more than 33 million years ago.
The preserved flower bloomed about halfway between the extinction of the last non-bird dinosaurs and the evolution of humans, who found it in the 19th century in territory that is now part of Russia. In 1872, scientists classified it as Stewartia kowalewskii, an extinct flowering evergreen.
The Baltic amber flower’s identity hadn’t been revised until Sadowski’s paper in Scientific Reports was published Thursday.
Plants in amber are a rarity. Among Baltic amber specimens, only 1% to 3% of trapped organisms are botanical.
While they’re harder to come by, plants in amber provide paleobotanists with a wealth of information, Sadowski said. Amber, which forms from tree resin, preserves ancient specimens in three dimensions, revealing “all the delicate features that you normally don’t get in other fossil types.”
Under a powerful microscope, Sadowski saw perfectly preserved details of the flower’s anatomy, along with specks of pollen, which she used to see if the plant had been sorted into the correct family 150 years ago.
Sadowski scraped grains from near the amber’s surface with a scalpel. After isolating and imaging the grains, her co-author on the study, Christa-Charlotte Hofmann at the University of Vienna, investigated the pollen, along with microscopic features of the flower’s anatomy. That pointed to an entirely different genus group than had been assigned in 1872: Symplocos, a genus of flowering shrubs and small trees not found in Europe today but widespread in modern East Asia.
The re-designation of the giant flower helps to flesh out what scientists know about the ecological diversity of the Baltic amber forest. It also sheds light on how Earth’s climate has changed over the last 35 million-odd years: The presence of Symplocos helps to show that ancient Europe was balmier than it has been for most of human history. — KATE GOLEMBIEWSKI / NYT
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