A resinous teardrop covered the delicate flower 40 million years ago. It happened on the Sambian peninsula, on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The passage of time fossilized this fluid encounter into a unique piece of amber. The flowers are ephemeral – that’s part of their beauty – but the delicacy of the resin-washed specimen was preserved for millennia until it was rediscovered in the 19th century. Thanks to its diameter of 28 millimeters, it was the largest fossilized flower preserved in amber, but no one paid much attention to it. Before.
“Its identity has never been documented in detail or thoroughly evaluated,” researchers Eva-Maria Sadowski and Christa-Charlotte Hoffmann write in a paper they are publishing this Thursday. in the magazine ability.
In this study, they offer new images of a flower nearly three times the size of other similarly preserved specimens. Specifically, it dates back to the late Eocene, 38 to 33.9 million years ago.
Scroll over the photo to see it in detail:
Source: El Diario
