Seven flowers from time dinosaurs discovered
Friday 1 November 2019
American scientists have discovered seven fossilized flower buds from the time of the dinosaurs in Myanmar.
These are flowers with five yellow-colored leaves, which grew 100 million years ago to an as yet unknown plant species in a rainforest. The flower buds are 3 to 5 millimeters in size and still fully intact.
Presumably the flowers have been preserved so well because they were buried under melted tree resin during a forest fire, which then petrified into amber and formed a kind of time capsule around the fossils.
American researchers report this in the scientific journal Palaeodiversity.
Picked
It is the first time that seven undamaged flowers have been discovered with an age of 100 million years. The scientists have studied the find with a microscope to find out the origin.
"The amber has protected the flower parts so well that they look like they have just been picked from a garden," explains lead researcher George Poinar on news site Phys.org. He suspects that dinosaurs are indirectly responsible for the special fossils.
Broken
“Dinosaurs may have broken the branches of the plant with flowers, causing the flower buds to fall in the tree resin next to the trunk of a conifer. Indeed, such a tree has produced the resin from which the amber eventually came into being. "
The scientists have also given a name to the 100 million-year-old plant from which the flowers come. The plant is now called Tropidogyne pentaptera.
By: Dennis Rijnvis (NU.nl) - Image: Oregon State University