You can almost recognize this 47.5-million-year-old fossilized flower as a pressed chrysanthemum. What you’re seeing is the ancestor of daisies, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, lettuce and artichokes, which evolved almost 50 million years ago, on a continent that no longer exists.
Researchers discovered this fossil in Patagonia. It’s incredibly rare to find such a well-preserved example of flora from so long ago. Most of the flower fossils that paleobotanists find are grains of pollen.
According to a release about the discovery:
Viviana Barreda and colleagues describe a well-preserved fossil flower, showing several hallmarks of the Astereae family, including leaflike structures called phyllaries surrounding the flowers and a set of slender, hair-like projections called the pappus, among the flowers. The fossil was found in rocks that are approximately 47.5 million years old and that lie along the Río Pichileufú, on the dry, windy steppes of northwestern Patagonia. The authors propose that an ancestral stock of Asteraceae may have arisen in the southern supercontinent of Gondwana before it broke apart into South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica.
Read the full scientific paper in Science.
