Washington
Announcing the discovery of the flower, named Strychnos electri, scientists said it lived around 30 million years ago, inside amber dug out of the side of a mountain in the Dominican Republic. They said it belonged to a group of flowers that is today the source of two types of poison, strychnine and curare. According to the researchers, it may have had toxic compounds.
Beauty under microscope:
Finding two samples of the small tubular-shaped flower, measuring roughly four-tenths of an inch, in the tan-coloured amber, Rutgers University botanist Lena Struwe said, “These amber pieces are like time capsules, a frozen moment of life that we can now relive and study,” said. “The flower is incredibly well-preserved, not distorted, not compressed, not fragmented into pieces, but looks like it just fell off its branch and dropped into sticky resin.”
The flowers lived in a tropical, humid forest alongside a variety of trees, shrubs, grasses and climbing vines, said Oregon State University entomologist and amber expert George Poinar. “Fossil flowers are rare under any circumstances”. Poinar said he was also impressed with the remarkablly fresh look of the flower preserved in amber. “It looed as if it had just fallen off a tree,” he said.
Amber represents a rich source of entombed fossils dating back as far as 130 million years, including mosquitoes and sand flies, spiders, millipedes, ticks, frogs, lizards and salamanders. In the book “Jurassic Park” and the movies it inspired, it was blood taken from the guts of mosquitoes that provided the DNA needed to create dinosaurs.
Strychnos electri is part of one of the three largest evolutionary lineages of flowering plants, known as the asterids, which also includes the sunflower, potato, coffee and mint families. “That this piece of amber has survived this intact for so many millions of years and then was found and ended up in our hands to be used for research is serendipitous and fantastic,” Struwe said.
The research was published in the journal Nature Plants.
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