It seems like something right out of Jurassic Park: finding a prehistoric creature preserved in amber that can provide us with essential information about Earth’s biological history. Fortunately, this find is not science fiction. Researchers have recently started studying specimen X4088: the largest known prehistoric flower to ever be found, perfectly preserved in amber.
This flower has a fascinating history itself. Its story starts near the Baltic Sea, in what is now Russia, sometime during the Eocene epoch. Botanically, this time period is considered the dawn of what we would know as modern plants. Sometime between 34 and 38 million years ago a large, five-petaled flower, fell from a large evergreen tree known as Stewartia kowalewskii and came in contact with a sticky resin, most likely from a conifer tree. There it was solidified, and preserved for millions of years to come.
Flash forward to 1872 and X4088 was discovered by humans, deep inside a Russian mine. The flower was interpreted as a pleasant example of preservation in tree resin, yet it was not studied by paleontologists at the time.
For 150 years after its discovery, the flower sat at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Germany, largely forgotten. That was until the flower caught the eye of researcher Eva-Maria Sadowski, a paleontologist in Germany. Sadowski looked at the specimen under a scanning electron microscope, in order to get a closer look. What she found was pollen, millions of years old, encased in the amber as well.
After studying the pollen further Sadowski and her team found that it was in fact misidentified. The flower was from a different genus entirely and is more closely related to specimens found in China and Japan today. They renamed the fossil Symplocos kowalewskii, in their recent paper, published in Scientific Reports.
The study of this prehistoric pollen can actually provide more information on how our climate might continue to change today. According to Regan Dunn, a paleontologist at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum: “These tiny grains are natural recorders of past climates and ecosystems that can help us measure how much our planet has changed in the past due to natural [nonhuman] causes.”
This fossil has huge implications for paleontology, not only for its size but its history. X4088 shows the importance of revisiting fossils, even hundreds of years after they are discovered. According to many paleontologists, our understanding of the biological record, particularly as it relates to fauna and flora, is changing constantly, which requires us to continue to question what we think we know about the past. Says Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, a paleobiologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History: “[the specimen] showcases the importance of revisiting fossils first studied decades ago.”
As research continues in this field, it is clear that we still have a lot to learn about prehistoric life. Paleontology as a whole continues to prove that reevaluating our past can provide more information about climate science in the future.
