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Roncus
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About 40 million years ago, a flower flourished in the Baltic coniferous forest. A resinous tree encases the falling petals and pollen, forever displaying the importance of the journal in the planet’s past.
Scientists have taken a recent look at a unique amber fossil that was first documented in 1872 and is attributed to pharmacist Kowalewski in what is now Kaliningrad, Russia.
The fossil strike had been largely forgotten in the collection of the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) in Berlin, according to Eva-Maria Sadowski, a postdoctoral researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin’s natural history museum, and the author. a new study
He said he had heard about the fossilized flower, officially known as specimen X4088, in passing by a colleague who had been removed from it and thought it was growing.
“He told me that he had visited BGR once and had seen the most wonderful and largest amber flower in his collection. I did not know that they had collections of amber. So I asked the curator of the BGR collection if I could see the collection – and there I found the specimen X4088,” he said via email.
“I was more surprised to see such a great flower of inclusion.”
At 28 mm (1.1 inches) elytria, the largest flower known in fossilized amber – three times the size of similar fossils.
Sadowski extracted and examined selected pollen. He found the flower misidentified when he first studied it.
“The original genus name of this specimen was Stewartia of the plant family Theaceae. But in our studies we were able to show that this was not correct, especially based on pollen morphology. But when the specimen was studied for the first time in the 19th century, pollen was not found or studied, he said.
The flower is closely related to a genus of flowering plants common in Asia today called Symplocos – shrubs or trees that sport white or yellow flowers.
Originally named Stewartia kowalewskii, the authors propose a new name for the flower Symplocos kowalewskii.
Amber fossils provide a tantalizing, three-dimensional look at the past. Also, plants and flowers, a dinosaur’s tail, a crab, a hell ant, a mother spider and her chicks, an ancient bird’s foot and a lizard’s skull were buried in balls of tree resin.
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday.
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