It is beautiful, deadly and new to science. And if that is not enough, it has been fossilised in amber for perhaps 30 million years.
Strychnos electri, the first ever fossilied member of a plant family called asterids, was unearthed 30 years ago in an amber mine in the Dominican Republic. The two specimen flowers encased in solidified resin for somewhere between 15 and 30 million years (were members of a family that includes potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, petunias, coffee and the providers of two famous poisons: strychnine and curare.
“The specimens are beautiful, perfectly preserved fossil flowers, which at one point in time were borne by plants that lived in a steamy tropical forest with both large and small trees, climbing vines, grasses and other vegetation,” said George Poinar, of Oregon State University, who with Lena Struwe of Rutgers University, reports in Nature Plants on evolution’s trophy from a distant past. The asterid family embraces an estimated 80,000 species, and one genus within the family is inherently toxic.
“Species of the genus Strychnos are almost all toxic in some way,” Prof Poinar said. “Each plant has its own alkaloids with varying effects. Some are more toxic than others and it may be that they were successful because their poisons offered some defence against herbivores. Today some of these toxins have been shown to possess useful and even medicinal properties.”
Resin as it hardens famously preserves trapped insects and plant tissue, but intact and perfectly preserved specimens are rare. Professor Poinar brought back 500 fossil samples from the amber mine after a field trip in 1986. He worked his way through the insects: it was some time before he got around to the flowers. “The flowers looked as though they had just fallen from a tree,” he said.
He sent them to Struwe, an expert in the genus, who has already discovered a new family of plants, three new genera and about 50 species.
She identified them as from the Strychnos genus, species hitherto unknown, and thought up the botanical name: Strychnos electri. Electron was the ancient Greek word for amber.
“The fossil turned out to have particular significance for our understanding of the evolution of plants in the Caribbean and the New World tropics,” Prof Struwe said.
“The discovery of this new species in a 30-year-old amber collection highlights that we still have many undiscovered species hidden away in natural history collections worldwide and not enough taxonomic experts to work through them. Strychnos electri has likely been extinct for a long time, but many new species living, and unfortunately, soon-to-be-extinct species are discovered by scientists every year.”
