A team of paleontologists has identified two ancient flowers trapped in the mid-Tertiary Dominican amber as belonging to a previously unknown species of the asterid family — one of the largest lineages of flowering plants, containing groups such as the sunflower, potato, coffee and mint families.
Strychnos electri, encased in amber, was found by Prof. George Poinar in a Dominican amber mine. Image credit: George Poinar / Oregon State University.
Asterids are among Earth’s most important and diverse plants, with 10 orders, 98 families, and about 80,000 species. They represent about one-third of all the planet’s diversity of flowering plants.
The new fossils are about 20 to 30 million years old and are only known as flowers, more precisely corollas with stamens and styles.
They represent a new species of the genus Strychnos, which ultimately gave rise to some of the world’s most famous poisons, including strychnine and curare.
“The specimens are beautiful, perfectly preserved fossil flowers, which at one point in time were borne by plants that lived in a steamy tropical forest with both large and small trees, climbing vines, palms, grasses and other vegetation,” said team member Prof. George Poinar, Jr., from Oregon State University.
“Specimens such as these are what give us insights into the ecology of ecosystems in the distant past,” he added.
“They show that the asterids, which later gave humans all types of foods and other products, were already evolving many millions of years ago.”
Strychnos electri. Image credit: George Poinar / Oregon State University.
Prof. Poinar and his colleague, Dr. Lena Struwe of Rutgers University, named the new species Strychnos electri in honor of its amber origin, since ‘elektron’ is the Greek word for amber.
“The species has likely been extinct for a long time, but many new species living and, unfortunately, soon-to-be-extinct species are discovered by scientists every year,” Prof. Poinar noted.
“The discovery of these two fossil flowers suggests that many other related plant families could have evolved in the Late Cretaceous in tropical forests,” the paleontologists said. “Their fossil remains, however, still await discovery.”
Strychnos electri is described in a paper in the journal Nature Plants.
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George O. Poinar Jr. & Lena Struwe. An asterid flower from neotropical mid-Tertiary amber. Nature Plants, article number: 16005, published online February 15, 2016; doi: 10.1038/nplants.2016.5
