A 30-million-year-old flower preserved in amber connects the Baltic with the East – Corriere.it

This story begins more than 30 million years ago, then resumes in 1872 and ends today. the story of the largest flower ever found enclosed and preserved in amber
, which has now been re-studied and assigned to another botanical genus. At first glance it might seem like a story that concerns only a small circle of botanist specialists, but it has wider implications. Indeed, it proves that the ancient forests that covered what is now the Baltic region, were home to plant species whose modern descendants are currently found only in East and Southeast Asia and formed a diverse ecosystem, composed of swamps and mixed forests.

Finding and classification

In one moment understood between 37.8 and 33.9 million years ago, during the geological epoch called the Upper Eocene, a trickle of resin covered a five-petal flower with a 28mm diameter corolla. He imprisoned it, but kept it forever as the resin prevented the flower from rotting and degrading. In 1872 the amber pebble was collected in a layer called Blue Earth in the Samland peninsula on the Baltic, near Knigsberg, the city of Kant, which was then in Prussia and then in Germany, while now it is called Kaliningrad and belongs to Russia. Botanists who studied the flower from the outside, in order not to spoil it, classified it as Stewartia kowalewskiibelonging to the Theaceae family, whose best-known genus is la camellia. After which the amber pebble was placed on a shelf in the collection of the Federal Institute of Geosciences and Natural Resources in Berlinwhere mentioned only because it contains the largest flower preserved in amber.

The new analyses

Now for the technology allows in-depth investigations without ruining the flower and without splitting the amber pebble in two. Two scientists, Eva-Maria Sadowski of the Natural History Museum of Berlin and Christa-Charlotte Hofmann of the Institute of Paleontology of the University of Vienna, thought that a new analysis could be attempted. With delicate tools they managed to extract pollen grains remained included in the amber, then analyzed at scanning electron microscope. Not without surprise, they realized that the classification, visual only, dating back to 150 years ago was wrong and the pollen analysis correlated the flower not to the Theaceae, but to the genus Symplocos, close to the ericaceae, for which the two experts proposed to rename it Symplocos kowalewskii. The study was published in Scientific Reports
.