Scientists from Germany and Austria re-study the largest flower found in amber

(Eva‑Maria Sadowski1 & Christa‑Charlotte Hofmann / Scientific Reports, 2023 https://go.nature.com/3IMfiFv)

A couple of paleobotanists from Germany and Austria have revisited the largest flower ever found in amber.

A sample from Baltic amber with a rim diameter of about three centimeters was originally placed in the tea family.

However, a pollen analysis conducted a century and a half later showed that the flower belongs to a plant from the Simplock family.

Paleontologists regularly find perfectly preserved remains of long-extinct plants and animals in amber.

Most of those discoveries in recent years are associated with the famous Burmese amber.

The scientists have found many living creatures that inhabited the Late Cretaceous rainforest and the fresh and brackish waters adjacent to it.

However, the study of amber from other regions sometimes brings no less interesting results.

For example, in the Baltic amber, which was formed in the late Eocene, various types of invertebrates, plants and fungi were found.

At the end of the 19th century, an unexpected large petrified flower with five petals and a corolla diameter of 28 millimeters was discovered in a sample of Baltic amber aged 33.9-38 million years0.

According to experts, it still remains the largest flower ever found in amber.

For comparison, the diameter of other flowers from the Baltic amber reaches only two to fifteen millimeters.

After analyzing the structure of the petrified flower, the German paleobotanist Robert Caspary attributed it to the genus Stewartia from the tea family (Theaceae) in 1872 .

At the same time, the sample was quite different from all modern species of this genus, so the scientist identified it as a new species Stewartia kowalewskii.

However, the description of Caspari was very brief. In addition, no one tried to check whether he correctly identified the plant.

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REVISITED ANCIENT PLANT
Now, two paleobotanists Eva-Maria Sadowski (Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity of the Leibniz Association) and Christa-Charlotte Hofmann (University of Vienna) decided to re-analyze the flower.

The researchers scraped off several pollen grains from it with a scalpel and examined them under a microscope.

It turned out that the shape of the pollen of an ancient plant corresponds to the genus Symplocos from the Symplocaceae family.

The structure of the flower also makes it possible to classify it as a symplocos. Thus, Caspari incorrectly placed the amber flower in the tea family.

Sadowski and Hofmann corrected the error and renamed it Symplocos kowalewskii.

The closest relatives of the Baltic Symplocos seem to be modern Asian species of the genus. Like them, it most likely was pollinated by insects.

Today, the range of the Symplocos family is limited to East Asia, Australia and America.

However, these plants originated in Europe about 52 million years ago and, as long as the local climate remained warm enough, they were quite diverse and widespread here.

Researchers assume that the Baltic amber was formed in humid temperate warm forests. The same conditions are preferred by modern symplocos.

Thus, the presence of the S. kowalewskii flower in Baltic amber confirms the accepted paleoecological reconstructions.

Sources:

• Scientific Reports: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-24549-z
• Scinex.de: https://www.scinexx.de/fotos/groesste-bernstein-blume-der-welt/
• CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/12/europe/largest-flower-amber-scn/index.html

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