Oregon State University specialists have discovered 18 small flowers inside a piece of amber during an analysis of a 100-million-year old fossil, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Botanical Institute of Texas.
The fossil were discovered from amber mines the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar "perfectly-preserved" according to the paper. The discovery reveals what specialists believe to be the oldest known evidence of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant.
The flowers are supposedly in "remarkable condition" according to ScienceDaily.com.
"In Cretaceous flowers we've never before seen a fossil that shows the pollen tube actually entering the stigma," said George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus in the Department of Integrative Biology at the OSU College of Science, in a statement. "This is the beauty of amber fossils. They are preserved so rapidly after entering the resin that structures such as pollen grains and tubes can be detected with a microscope."
German analyst Dr. Joerg Wunderlich obtained the fossil from gold diggers in Myanmar and then transferred it to Corvallis. From there, Poinar and college Kenton Chambers of the OSU Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, analyzed the fossil, according to the paper.
Poinar confirmed that the flower's pollen was sticky, meaning it could have been carried by a pollinating insect.
The plants likely appeared first during the Creataceous period, when Dinosaurs still ruled Earth and new species of mammals, birds, plants and bugs were being introduced.
"The evolution of flowering plants caused an enormous change in the biodiversity of life on Earth, especially in the tropics and subtropics," Poinar said in a statement, according to the study. "New associations between these small flowering plants and various types of insects and other animal life resulted in the successful distribution and evolution of these plants through most of the world today," he said. "It's interesting that the mechanisms for reproduction that are still with us today had already been established some 100 million years ago."
The flower was named Micropetasos burmensis, according to the paper.
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