Geology In

Tiny, Mineral Grains Could Explain a Fundamental Tectonic Force

Earth History, Geology, Tectonic 7:39 PM

Tiny, Mineral Grains Could Explain a Fundamental Tectonic Force

Mylonite from near Røragen, Norway. Photo: Mikenorton Subduction happens when one tectonic plate slides under another plate and then sinks...

50 Million-Year-Old Fossil Assassin Bug Has Unusually Well-preserved Anatomy

Earth History, Fossils 6:51 PM

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v5fpTvtCuJY/YAG5m62UC6I/AAAAAAAASwU/-86v5D-4mp4kbcbf_bZrXV3GGGy7yV7ZgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1200/50%2BMillion-year-old%2BFossil%2BAssassin%2BBug%2BHas%2BUnusually%2BWell-preserved%2BAnatomy%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="50 Million-year-old Fossil Assassin Bug Has Unusually Well-preserved Anatomy" border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="426" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v5fpTvtCuJY/YAG5m62UC6I/AAAAAAAASwU/-86v5D-4mp4kbcbf_bZrXV3GGGy7yV7ZgCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h426/50%2BMillion-year-old%2BFossil%2BAssassin%2BBug%2BHas%2BUnusually%2BWell-preserved%2BAnatomy%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Recovered from the Green River Formation in present-day Colorado, this fossil represents a new genus and species of predatory insects known as assassin bugs. Researchers named the specimen Aphelicophontes danjuddi. A small beetle was also fossilized with the specimen. Photos by Daniel Swanson</td></tr></tbody></table>   The fossil of an ancient assassin bug preserves its anatomy in remarkable detail, researchers report.The fossilized insect is tiny and its genital capsule, called a pygophore, is roughly the length of a grain of rice. It is remarkable, scientists say, because the bug’s physical characteristics – from the bold banding pattern on its legs to the internal features of its genitalia – are clearly visible and well-preserved. Recovered from the Green River Formation in present-day Colorado, the fossil represents a new genus and species of predatory insects known as assassin bugs. The find is reported in the journal Papers in Palaeontology. Discovered in 2006 by breaking open a slab of rock, the fossilized bug split almost perfectly from head to abdomen. The fracture also cracked the pygophore in two. A fossil dealer later sold each half to a different collector, and the researchers tracked them down and reunited them for this study. Being able to see a bug’s genitalia is very helpful when trying to determine a fossil insect’s place in its family tree, said Sam Heads, a paleontologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey and self-described fossil insect-genitalia expert who led the research with Daniel Swanson, a graduate student in entomology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Species are often defined by their ability to successfully mate with one another, and small differences in genitalia can lead to sexual incompatibilities that, over time, may result in the rise of new species, Swanson said. This makes the genitalia a good place to focus to determine an insect species. But such structures are often obscured in compression fossils like those from the Green River Formation. “To see these fine structures in the internal genitalia is a rare treat,” Swanson said. “Normally, we only get this level of detail in species that are living today.” The structures visible within the pygophore include the basal plate, a hardened, stirrup-shaped structure that supports the phallus, he said. The fossil also preserved the contours of the phallotheca, a pouch into which the phallus can be withdrawn. The find suggests that the banded assassin bugs, a group to which the new specimen is thought to belong, are about 25 million years older than previously thought, Swanson said. “There are about 7,000 species of assassin bug described, but only about 50 fossils of these bugs are known,” he said. “This just speaks to the improbability of even having a fossil, let alone one of this age, that offers this much information.” This is not the oldest fossil bug genitalia ever discovered, however. “The oldest known arthropod genitalia are from a type of bug known as a harvestman that is 400-412 million years old, from the Rhynie Chert of Scotland,” Heads said. “And there are also numerous fossil insects in amber as old as the Cretaceous Period with genitalia preserved. “However, it is almost unheard of for internal male genitalia to be preserved in carbonaceous compressions like ours,” he said. The researchers named the new assassin bug Aphelicophontes danjuddi. The species name comes from one of the fossil collectors, Dan Judd, who donated his half of the specimen to the INHS for study.  The above story is based on <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Rzy25YcHGN0J:https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/848450653+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="https://illinois.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">University of Illinois.</a>

50 Million-Year-Old Fossil Assassin Bug Has Unusually Well-preserved Anatomy

Recovered from the Green River Formation in present-day Colorado, this fossil represents a new genus and species of predatory insects known ...

57,000-Year-Old Frozen Remains of Wolf Pup Found in Canada

Earth History, Fossils, Researches 6:57 PM

57,000-Year-Old Frozen Remains of Wolf Pup Found in Canada

Credit: Government of Yukon A wolf cub that was found mummified in northern Canada lived at least 56,000 years ago, scientists say. Hidden...

Geyser Activity Does Not Foretell Yellowstone Volcanic Eruptions

Tectonic, volcano, Yellowstone 6:37 PM

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oK5JnjGCAw0/X_SHW1yARhI/AAAAAAAASv4/CNjCpgJ3mLM1Shz_D3ZEFrbEERDmPEV1wCLcBGAsYHQ/s1280/The%2B2018%2Breawakening%2Band%2Beruption%2Bdynamics%2Bof%2BSteamboat%2BGeyser%252C%2Bthe%2Bworld%25E2%2580%2599s%2Btallest%2Bactive%2Bgeyser%2B%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The 2018 reawakening and eruption dynamics of Steamboat Geyser, the world’s tallest active geyser" border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oK5JnjGCAw0/X_SHW1yARhI/AAAAAAAASv4/CNjCpgJ3mLM1Shz_D3ZEFrbEERDmPEV1wCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h360/The%2B2018%2Breawakening%2Band%2Beruption%2Bdynamics%2Bof%2BSteamboat%2BGeyser%252C%2Bthe%2Bworld%25E2%2580%2599s%2Btallest%2Bactive%2Bgeyser%2B%25282%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>  When Yellowstone National Park's Steamboat Geyser—which shoots water higher than any active geyser in the world—reawakened in 2018 after three and a half years of dormancy, some speculated that it was a harbinger of possible explosive volcanic eruptions within the surrounding geyser basin. These so-called hydrothermal explosions can hurl mud, sand and rocks into the air and release hot steam, endangering lives; such an explosion on White Island in New Zealand in December 2019 killed 22 people. A new study by geoscientists who study geysers throws cold water on that idea, finding few indications of underground magma movement that would be a prerequisite to an eruption. The geysers sit just outside the nation's largest and most dynamic volcanic caldera, but no major eruptions have occurred in the past 70,000 years. "Hydrothermal explosions—basically hot water exploding because it comes into contact with hot rock—are one of the biggest hazards in Yellowstone," said Michael Manga, professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and the study's senior author. "The reason that they are problematic is that they are very hard to predict; it is not clear if there are any precursors that would allow you to provide warning." He and his team found that, while the ground around the geyser rose and seismicity increased somewhat before the geyser reactivated and the area currently is radiating slightly more heat into the atmosphere, no other dormant geysers in the basin have restarted, and the temperature of the groundwater propelling Steamboat's eruptions has not increased. Also, no sequence of Steamboat eruptions other than the one that started in 2018 occurred after periods of high seismic activity. <div style="width:100%;margin: 0px auto">
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</div> "We don't find any evidence that there is a big eruption coming. I think that is an important takeaway," he said. Manga, who has studied geysers around the world and created some in his own laboratory, set out with his colleagues to answer three main questions about Steamboat Geyser: Why did it reawaken? Why is its period so variable, ranging from 3 to 17 days? and Why does it spurt so high? The team found answers to two of those questions. By comparing the column heights of 11 different geysers in the United States, Russia, Iceland and Chile with the estimated depth of the reservoir of water from which their eruptions come, they found that the deeper the reservoir, the higher the eruption jet. Steamboat Geyser, with a reservoir about 25 meters (82 feet) below ground, has the highest column—up to 115 meters, or 377 feet—while two geysers that Manga measured in Chile were among the lowest—eruptions about a meter (3 feet) high from reservoirs 2 and 5 meters below ground. "What you are really doing is you are filling a container, it reaches a critical point, you empty it and then you run out of fluid that can erupt until it refills again," he said. "The deeper you go, the higher the pressure. The higher the pressure, the higher the boiling temperature. And the hotter the water is, the more energy it has and the higher the geyser." To explore the reasons for Steamboat Geyser's variability, the team assembled records related to 109 eruptions going back to its reactivation in 2018. The records included weather and stream flow data, seismometer and ground deformation readings, and observations by geyser enthusiasts. They also looked at previous active and dormant periods of Steamboat and nine other Yellowstone geysers, and ground surface thermal emission data from the Norris Geyser Basin. They concluded that variations in rainfall and snow melt were probably responsible for part of the variable period, and possibly for the variable period of other geysers as well. In the spring and early summer, with melting snow and rain, the underground water pressure pushes more water into the underground reservoir, providing more hot water to erupt more frequently. During winter, with less water, lower groundwater pressure refills the reservoir more slowly, leading to longer periods between eruptions. Because the water pushed into the reservoir comes from places even deeper than the reservoir, the water is decades or centuries old before it erupts back to the surface, he said. In October, Manga's team members demonstrated the extreme impact water shortages and drought can have on geysers. They showed that Yellowstone's iconic Old Faithful Geyser stopped erupting entirely for about 100 years in the 13th and 14th centuries, based on radiocarbon dating of mineralized lodgepole pine trees that grew around the geyser during its dormancy. Normally the water is too alkaline and the temperature too high for trees to grow near active geysers. The dormancy period coincided with a lengthy warm, dry spell across the Western U.S. called the Medieval Climate Anomaly, which may have caused the disappearance of several Native American civilizations in the West. "Climate change is going to affect geysers in the future," Manga said. Manga and his team were unable to determine why Steamboat Geyser started up again on March 15, 2018, after three years and 193 days of inactivity, though the geyser is known for being far more variable than Old Faithful, which usually goes off about every 90 minutes. They could find no definitive evidence that new magma rising below the geyser caused its reactivation. The reactivation may have to do with changes in the internal plumbing, he said. Geysers seem to require three ingredients: heat, water and rocks made of silica—silicon dioxide. Because the hot water in geysers continually dissolves and redeposits silica—every time Steamboat Geyser erupts, it brings up about 200 kilograms, or 440 pounds of dissolved silica. Some of this silica is deposited underground and may change the plumbing system underneath the geyser. Such changes could temporarily halt or reactivate eruptions if the pipe gets rerouted, he said. Manga has experimented with geysers in his lab to understand why they erupt periodically, and at least in the lab, it appears to be caused by loops or side chambers in the pipe that trap bubbles of steam that slowly dribble out, heating the water column above until all the water can boil from the top down, explosively erupting in a column of water and steam. Studies of water eruptions from geysers could give insight into the eruptions of hot rock from volcanoes, he said. "What we asked are very simple questions and it is a little bit embarrassing that we can't answer them, because it means there are fundamental processes on Earth that we don't quite understand," Manga said. "One of the reasons we argue we need to study geysers is that if we can't understand and explain how a geyser erupts, our hope for doing the same thing for magma is much lower."  The above story is based on <a href="https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2020943118" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="https://www.berkeley.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">University of California - Berkeley.</a>

Geyser Activity Does Not Foretell Yellowstone Volcanic Eruptions

When Yellowstone National Park's Steamboat Geyser—which shoots water higher than any active geyser in the world—reawakened in 2018 aft...

Extinct Woolly Rhinoceros Found Frozen in Siberian Permafrost

Earth History, extinction 6:50 PM

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QPULbRn13sw/X-yd1dqRF5I/AAAAAAAASu4/aiTE38HR6DYINewd-hINYYLutfUkydmBgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1351/Extinct%2BWoolly%2BRhinoceros%2BFound%2BFrozen%2Bin%2BSiberian%2BPermafrost.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="848" data-original-width="1351" height="402" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QPULbRn13sw/X-yd1dqRF5I/AAAAAAAASu4/aiTE38HR6DYINewd-hINYYLutfUkydmBgCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h402/Extinct%2BWoolly%2BRhinoceros%2BFound%2BFrozen%2Bin%2BSiberian%2BPermafrost.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sasha the baby woolly rhino found in 2014 in Yakutia lived 34,000 years ago. Picture: Albert Protopopov </td></tr></tbody></table> AN EXTINCT woolly rhinoceros has been found in an incredible condition after spending up to 50,000 years frozen in Siberian permafrost. The frozen carcass was discovered 80 per cent intact by scientists in the Abyisky district of Yakutia in Russia. It was discovered close to the site where the world’s only baby woolly rhino - named Sasha - was dug out in 2014. Two extinct cave lion cubs were also found in the same area last year. The juvenile rhino with thick hazel-coloured hair and the horn, found next to the carcass was discovered in the middle of August in permafrost deposits by river Tirekhtyakh in the Abyisky ulus (district) of the Republic of Sakha. The sensational discovery is still in the Arctic Yakutia waiting for ice roads to form, so that it can be delivered to scientists in the republic’s capital Yakutsk. <div style="margin: 0px auto; width: 100%;">
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</div> It is the best preserved to date juvenile woolly rhino ever found in Yakutia, with a lot of its internal organs - including its teeth, part of the intestines, a lump of fat and tissues - kept intact for thousands of years in permafrost. ‘The young rhino was between three and four years old and lived separately from its mother when it died, most likely by drowning’, said Dr Valery Plotnikov from the Academy of Sciences who has been to the discovery site and made the first description of the find. ‘The gender of the animal is still unknown. We are waiting for the radiocarbon analyses to define when it lived, the most likely range of dates is between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago. The rhino has a very thick short underfur, very likely it died in summer’, Dr Plotnikov said. The rhino’s carcass is 80 per cent intact; it was discovered by local resident Alexei Savvin close to the site where the world’s only baby woolly rhino called Sasha was dug out in 2014. Sasha’s aged has been since confirmed as 34,000 years. Two extinct cave lion cubs later called Boris and Sparta were also found in the Abyisky district of Yakutia last year close to the Tirekhtyakh River. Sasha the wooly rhino was seven months old when it died and had lightly-coloured strawberry blond fur/hair. The baby rhino also had stubs of two horns.<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5na5tpQZlQ0/X-yewMelD0I/AAAAAAAASvA/BmqrAEJQHsMUlCkGTvC_5b31WuHhbGd0ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1220/Frozen%2BCarcass%2Bof%2Ban%2BExtinct%2BWoolly%2BRhino%2BFrom%2Bthe%2BIce%2BAge%2BIs%2BUnearthed%2BFrom%2Bthe%2BSiberian%2BPermafrost.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="804" data-original-width="1220" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5na5tpQZlQ0/X-yewMelD0I/AAAAAAAASvA/BmqrAEJQHsMUlCkGTvC_5b31WuHhbGd0ACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Frozen%2BCarcass%2Bof%2Ban%2BExtinct%2BWoolly%2BRhino%2BFrom%2Bthe%2BIce%2BAge%2BIs%2BUnearthed%2BFrom%2Bthe%2BSiberian%2BPermafrost.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The frozen carcass was found 80 per cent intact Credit: East2west News </td></tr></tbody></table> Dr Plotnikov said of Sasha: ‘We have learned that woolly rhinoceroses were covered in very thick hair. Previously, we could judge this only from rock paintings discovered in France. 'Now, judging by the thick coat with the undercoat, we can conclude that the rhinoceroses were fully adapted to the cold climate from a young age.’

Extinct Woolly Rhinoceros Found Frozen in Siberian Permafrost

Sasha the baby woolly rhino found in 2014 in Yakutia lived 34,000 years ago. Picture: Albert Protopopov AN EXTINCT woolly rhinoceros has be...

Kernowite: New Green Mineral Discovered in 220-year-old Rock

Geochemistry, Mineralogy, Researches 7:28 PM

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KVfsc-fpjv4/X-oGvE-HiVI/AAAAAAAASug/2us6s2mV1-MKiWUrWRo_G3YK1-kgeKNywCLcBGAsYHQ/s1281/new-mineral-kernowite-full-width.jpg.thumb.1160%2B%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="740" data-original-width="1281" height="370" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KVfsc-fpjv4/X-oGvE-HiVI/AAAAAAAASug/2us6s2mV1-MKiWUrWRo_G3YK1-kgeKNywCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h370/new-mineral-kernowite-full-width.jpg.thumb.1160%2B%25281%2529.jpg" title="Kernowite: New Green Mineral Discovered in 220-year-old Rock" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kernowite (green color). Image credit: The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. </td></tr></tbody></table> Known from just a single location, a new species of mineral has been described from the UK. A sample of rock that was collected from a mine in Cornwall some 220 years ago has turned out to be an entirely new species of mineral. While most new minerals are so small that their colour isn't easy to appreciate, this latest addition forms large emerald-green crystals. Mike Rumsey is the Principal Curator of Minerals at the Museum and is the one who initiated the investigation and subsequently discovered the new mineral with colleagues at the NHM and collaborators from Slovakia and the Diamond Lightsource in Harwell, Oxford. 'I was investigating a mineral called liroconite so we could curate it properly, but also because it's my favourite mineral!’ explains Mike. 'Liroconite is this beautiful, gorgeous bright blue mineral that comes from Cornwall and I was trying to understand why its colour varies from bright teal-blue all the way to a dark emerald green. 'It turns out that the darkest green samples are sufficiently chemically different to the blue's that we, as mineralogists, would define it as a new species.' <div style="margin: 0px auto; width: 100%;">
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</div> The new description has now been approved by the governing body and the new species kernowite will be published in Mineralogical Magazine in the new year. A journal started back in the UK in 1876 with founders from the old BM(NH). <h4 style="text-align: left;">New species of minerals</h4>When people talk about the discovery of a new species many will tend to think of a new plant or animal. But when Carl Linnaeus first came up with the now universal system of naming things in the eighteenth century, he also included the minerals within this system.   This means that whenever a new mineral is described, it is also classed as a new species. 'Like other branches of natural sciences, minerals and rocks were organised by early scientists in a way that allowed people to recognise connections and links between them,' says Mike. 'The term species in the life sciences really gained traction thanks to the work of Linnaeus. 'He also included the mineral kingdom in his classifications, so minerals ended up with some of the same language for their descriptions. Other terms like genus have not made it through though, as minerals don't really have a strongly hierarchical structure in their organisation, although that's something being discussed by scientists currently.' To be described as a new species, a new mineral needs to meet a number of criteria. These relate largely to determining what the chemistry of the new material is and how the atoms within the material are arranged in three-dimensional space and then how that arrangement repeats to make up the crystals that we see. This is what mineralogists call crystal structure. 'In the crystal structure of liroconite, one of the positions where you can put an atom can contain either aluminium or iron,' explains Mike. 'For liroconite, the position is dominantly filled with aluminium and the physical crystal ends up being blue. 'For the new mineral kernowite the position is instead dominantly filled with iron and the result is a green crystal. We think that the more iron the darker the green, but that still needs some more work and more samples to confirm. Both minerals have exactly the same crystal structure meaning that all the atoms are in the same positions, it is just the chemical composition that varies.' <h4 style="text-align: left;">Cornish type</h4>There are only around 100 new species of mineral described every year, and not many with large colourful crystals. It is even rarer to have a new mineral described from the UK, something which only happens once every three or four years on average. The new species is currently known from a single location in Cornwall, which has given rise to its new name kernowite, after Kernow which is the Cornish word for Cornwall. 'Based on it's mining history Cornwall is a world UNESCO heritage site known around the world for the discovery for many new minerals,' says Mike. 'However, a lot of these discoveries happened over 100 years go when the mines were still active, so the discovery of a new mineral from Cornwall, particularly one that related to the regions most famous mineral, is really quite amazing.' The mine from which kernowite has been found is also the location from which the majority of the world's liroconite is derived, which is highly prized among collectors. 'Most liroconite comes from this place called Wheal Gorland,' explains Mike. 'The mine was used between around 1790 and 1909, but it has been demolished now. There is a housing estate on it and there is nothing left. It’s an extinct locality, we can never go back.' Because liroconite is such a famous mineral, there could be samples of kernowite in other museums that have for all this time also been grouped with the liroconite, so the community may well discover these now the other curators know what they're looking for. But with the demolition of the mine, it means that more samples of the mineral may never be found again. 'What we've got is a bit like a little time capsule,' says Mike. 'The fact that this sample was preserved in a museum means that we can do this kind of research because we'd never be able to go back and collect any more.' Hopefully other samples will be found in other public and private collections, but until that happens then the one sample held at the Museum and another in a private collection are the only known examples of Kernowite in the entire world.    <h4 style="text-align: left;">What is a mineral?</h4>A mineral is naturally occurring chemical substance formed by geological processes A rock is an object formed of one, or many minerals in combination Many minerals form beautiful crystals, the most prized being those with bright colours, glass-like transparency and attractive crystal forms The above story is based on <a href="https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2020/december/beautiful-new-emerald-green-mineral-described-from-cornwall.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="https://nhm.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Natural History Museum (NHM).</a>

Kernowite: New Green Mineral Discovered in 220-year-old Rock

Kernowite (green color). Image credit: The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Known from just a single location, a new species ...

99-Million-Year-Old Fossil Flower Found Encased in Burmese Amber

amber, Fossils 6:46 PM

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m1sGtTogjPU/X-dZ0_RQV8I/AAAAAAAASuU/I67xe8rETjANnM66oB9HsqretIzq_WjSACLcBGAsYHQ/s1368/image_9184_1e-Valviloculus-pleristaminis%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="719" data-original-width="1368" height="336" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m1sGtTogjPU/X-dZ0_RQV8I/AAAAAAAASuU/I67xe8rETjANnM66oB9HsqretIzq_WjSACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h336/image_9184_1e-Valviloculus-pleristaminis%2B%25281%2529.jpg" title="99-Million-Year-Old Fossil Flower Found Encased in Burmese Amber" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Valviloculus pleristaminis, flower in lateral view. Image credit: Poinar, Jr. et al., doi: 10.17348/jbrit.v14.i2.1014. </td></tr></tbody></table>  A rare flower is finally getting its moment in the sun, almost 100 million years after it blossomed. Researchers at Oregon State University have identified a new species of angiosperm, or flowering plant, from the Cretaceous Period that was preserved in a shard of amber found in what is now Myanmar. Sometimes you don't know what you've got till it's gone. Valviloculus pleristaminis makes for a perfect example. Scientists only recently identified this mysterious, extinct flower. It once bloomed in the Cretaceous period - a floral relic of a bygone age, preserved in time-stopping amber since some nameless day when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. <div style="width:100%;margin: 0px auto">
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</div> "This isn't quite a Christmas flower but it is a beauty, especially considering it was part of a forest that existed 100 million years ago," says emeritus professor George Poinar Jr. from Oregon State University. Poinar Jr. is something of an authority on the time-capsule-esque capabilities of amber. The octogenarian entomologist is widely regarded as the scientist who popularised the phenomenon of prehistoric insects and nematodes being trapped in tree resin over geological timescales – ideas that took flight, literally much of the time, in the pop culture fantasy of Jurassic Park. This lifelong focus began decades ago, but Poinar Jr.'s academic output is still prodigious. In recent years he's described ancient, engorged ticks, discovered new orders of insect life, traced the origins of malaria, and found his fair share of forgotten flowers. V. pleristaminis, which represents both a new genus and species of flower, is among the latest in this ever-expanding bouquet. "The male flower is tiny, about 2 millimetres across, but it has some 50 stamens arranged like a spiral, with anthers pointing toward the sky," Poinar explains. "Despite being so small, the detail still remaining is amazing. Our specimen was probably part of a cluster on the plant that contained many similar flowers, some possibly female." The specimen in question was obtained from amber mines in Myanmar, having been preserved in marine sedimentary deposits dating back to the mid-Cretaceous, approximately 99 million years ago. According to the researchers, V. pleristaminis, an example of an angiosperm (flowering plant), likely belongs to the order Laurales, particularly bearing some resemblance to the families Monimiaceae and Atherospermataceae. But this strange, extinct flower doesn't just offer clues about the history of floral evolution. According to Poinar Jr., V. pleristaminis and other Burmese amber angiosperm fossils like it may also help to solve an outstanding mystery about the ancient supercontinent Gondwana from which these plants first arose. Specifically, V. pleristaminis would have once blossomed on a chunk of Gondwana called the West Burma Block, which broke off from the rest of the supercontinent at some unknown point in history. Quite when is a matter of some debate, with some geological hypotheses putting the date of separation as far back as 500 million years ago. Research by Poinar Jr. however suggests that the West Burma Block could not have rafted from Gondwana to Asia before the early Cretaceous, given angiosperms only evolved and diversified about 100 million years ago. The debate isn't likely to be over any time soon, but V. pleristaminis and its amber-coated ilk provide a fresh line of thinking on the matter – a budding secret waiting to be told for almost 100 million years. "The dating of [the West Burma Block] tectonic migration from Gondwana is not yet firmly established, but the 100 Ma age of the amber, with its included Southern Hemisphere-related plant and animal fossils, may factor into an eventual solution to this problem," the researchers write.  The above story is based on <a href="https://journals.brit.org/jbrit/article/view/1014" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="https://oregonstate.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Oregon State University.</a>

99-Million-Year-Old Fossil Flower Found Encased in Burmese Amber

Valviloculus pleristaminis, flower in lateral view. Image credit: Poinar, Jr. et al., doi: 10.17348/jbrit.v14.i2.1014. A rare flower is fi...

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