After all that time, researchers must come to grips with a bombshell revelation: this flower has been masquerading as the wrong species.
The flower was fossilized more than 33 million years ago in the Baltic region as an amber inclusion, formed when sticky resin from a plant evaporated and hardened. It takes a great deal of luck for an organism to die in the right place, time, and climate to be preserved in amber, and even more to survive that preservation into the present day. And while amber inclusions of insects are most abundant, plants are rare.
The new study upends both the naming and preservation of the flower. To re-analyze the specimen, which is now held in the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Berlin-Spandau, the researchers had to first exhume it from a century-old glass chamber and cover slip that had yellowed and cracked. Once freed, “A wet leather cloth with a tooth paste suspension was used for polishing all amber surfaces,” the authors wrote.
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