The largest fossilised flower ever discovered encased in amber was borrowed by Eva-Maria Sadowski, a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, without any specific purpose in mind.
“I did it without any expectations, I just did it because I was curious,” she said.
She followed the trail of a more than 150-year-old instance of identity confusion, revealing new details about the Baltic amber forest of Northern Europe more than 33 million years ago. The fossilised flower was discovered in the 19th century in an area that is now part of Russia. It blossomed around midway between the demise of the last nonbird dinosaurs and the development of humans. It was identified by scientists as the extinct flowering evergreen Stewartia kowalewskii in 1872.
It wasn’t until Thursday’s publication of Sadowski’s research in Scientific Reports that the identity of the Baltic amber flower was changed. Despite being more difficult to find, plants in amber provide palaeobotanists a plethora of data, according to Sadowski. Ancient examples are preserved in three dimensions by the resin of trees called amber, showing “all the delicate features that you normally don’t get in other fossil types.”
The flower that drew Sadowski’s attention was an inch broad, making it three times larger than the next biggest bloom ever found preserved in amber. Before she went looking for the flower, a co-worker had described its “huge” size, and she questioned whether he was exaggerating. Not at all. She then made the decision to find out what Stewartia kowalewskii might tell us about 150 years of technical development.
As soon as she got the fossil flower in her possession, Sadowski used toothpaste and a moist leather cloth to polish the amber block, using a process she had learned from her PhD advisor, Alexander Schmidt, who had acquired some of his skills from a dentist. Sadowski saw particles of pollen and fully preserved anatomical characteristics of the blossom under a strong microscope. She examined the pollen to determine 150 years ago if the plant had been assigned to the proper family.
With a scalpel, Sadowski removed a few grains from the amber’s surface. “I only do that on a very quiet morning in my office, where no one disturbs me — you need steady hands, no shaking,” she said., according to the art daily. Her co-author on the paper, Christa-Charlotte Hofmann of the University of Vienna, examined the pollen as well as microscopic elements of the flower’s anatomy after separating and photographing the grains. That indicated Symplocos, a genus of flowering shrubs and tiny trees not currently present in Europe but common in contemporary East Asia, which referred to an altogether different genus group than had been designated in 1872.
The renaming of the enormous bloom contributes to the scientific understanding of the biological variety of the Baltic amber woodland. The existence of Symplocos also serves to demonstrate how Earth’s climate has altered over the past 35 million years: Symplocos provides evidence that ancient Europe was warmer than it has been for the most of human history.
“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,” said Regan Dunn, a palaeobotanist at La Brea Tar Pits and Museum who was not involved with the research. “This allows us to better understand just how much our species is impacting the planet.”
Although enthusiasts of “Jurassic Park” may be dismayed to find that there is no way of obtaining DNA from the amber flower, George Poinar Jr., a scientist whose study served as the inspiration for the series, indicated that there would undoubtedly be other advances. In the nearly 50 years that he has studied amber, improvements in microscopy have revealed previously obscured characteristics of ancient species in spectacular and unambiguous ways. “I think that’s fascinating, for people to see life like that,” he said.