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PAL AEO NTO LOGY
100-MILLION-YEAR-OLD
FLOWERS FOUND PERFECTLY
PRESERVED IN AMBER
Millions of years ago, in a pine forest in
Myanmar, a group of tiny flowers fell
tumbling to the ground. Upon falling,
they landed in a patch of tree resin,
which later fossilised into crystal clear
amber – keeping them in perfect
condition until they were discovered
by a team at Oregon State University
earlier this year.
Dubbed Tropidogyne pentaptera
thanks to their distinctive shape,
(‘penta’ means five and ‘pteron’ means
wing), the flowers belong to a
previously undiscovered species of
tree and date back to the Cretaceous
Period, making them around 100
million years old.
The flowers lack petals but have
pronounced sepals – green leaf-like
structures that protect the flower while
it’s in bud – and measure between 3.4
and 5mm in diameter.
“The amber preserved the floral
parts so well that they look like they
were just picked from the garden,” said
researcher Prof George Poinar Jr.
“Passing dinosaurs may have knocked
the branches that dropped the flowers
into resin deposits on the bark of an
araucaria tree, which is thought to have
produced the resin that fossilised into
the amber.”
The flowers have been placed in the
family Cunoniaceae, a group of trees
still common to the Southern
Hemisphere, and are believed to have
belonged to a rainforest tree. The
closest living relative to the prehistoric
tree is likely to be the coachwood tree
found in Australia. This also has no
petals, only sepals, can grow to heights
greater than 35m, lives for centuries
and produces an attractive hardwood
that is used for flooring and furniture.
This li�le �ower is
an incredible 100
million years old
OCTOBER 2017
S PACE TR AVEL
HUMAN WASTE
COULD BE THE KEY
TO LONG-DISTANCE
SPACE TRAVEL
If we are ever going to have any chance of
making it to Mars, astronauts are going to
have to make the best use of every possible
resource – even their own urine. Crew on-
board the International Space Station
already have a system in place that creates
drinking water from urine. But now, a team
at Clemson University in South Carolina
has taken things a step further by making a
system that can create plastics from human
urine and exhaled breath.
“If astronauts are going to make journeys
that span several years, we’ll need to find a
way to reuse and recycle everything they
bring with them,” said researcher David
Blenner. “Having a biological system that
astronauts can awaken from a dormant state
to start producing what they need, when they
need it, is the motivation for our project.”
The system takes the nitrogen from urine
and carbon dioxide from exhaled breath and
uses them to feed a type of yeast, Yarrowia
lipolytica, that has been genetically
engineered to churn out monomers – a
special type of molecule that can be strung
together to form plastic polymers. The
plastic, in this case polyester, can then be
3D printed to make tools and replacement
parts as needed.
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