Abstract
The rapid Cretaceous diversification of flowering plants remains Darwin’s ‘abominable mystery’ despite numerous fossil flowers discovered in recent years. Wildfires were frequent in the Cretaceous and many such early flower fossils are represented by charcoalified fragments, lacking complete delicate structures and surface textures, making their similarity to living forms difficult to discern. Furthermore, scarcity of information about the ecology of early angiosperms makes it difficult to test hypotheses about the drivers of their diversification, including the role of fire in shaping flowering plant evolution. We report the discovery of two exquisitely preserved fossil flower species, one identical to the inflorescences of the extant crown-eudicot genus Phylica and the other recovered as a sister group to Phylica, both preserved as inclusions together with burned plant remains in Cretaceous amber from northern Myanmar (~99 million years ago). These specialized flower species, named Phylica piloburmensis sp. nov. and Eophylica priscastellata gen. et sp. nov., exhibit traits identical to those of modern taxa in fire-prone ecosystems such as the fynbos of South Africa, and provide evidence of fire adaptation in angiosperms.
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Data availability
The Micro-XCT scanning data are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3997200). Videos of the 3D reconstruction of internal and external structures of the fossil specimens are available at Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12865859.v4). High resolution images of all the figures are available at Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12845144).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Profs. Z.-k. Zhou, P. Herendeen, S. R. Manchester, Y.-w. Xing, G.-l. Shi, H.-l. You, C. Hoorn, G. Li, Z. Feng, D. Ren, B. Wang and Z.-j. Liu for their valuable advice on earlier versions of this manuscript; J.-a. Xia for his help with drawing the palaeoenvironment reconstruction; and F.-c. Zheng for help with micro-CT data analyses. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31801022 for S.W. and No. 31701090 for C.S.), and co-sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41790454 and No. 41688103 for Y.D.W.), Strategic Priority Research Program (B) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDB18000000 and No. XDB26000000 for Y.D.W.), the State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy (No. 20191103 for Y.D.W. and No. 213119 for S.W.), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (Grant No. ZR2019BC094 for S.W.). This work is a contribution to UNESCO-IUGS IGCP Project 679.
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S.W. and C.S. conceived the study and wrote the paper. R.A.S., M.S.E., H.S., E.T., S.W., C.-y.C. and C.S. revised the paper. C.S., S.W., H.P., N.L., X.L., Q.-p.X., Z.-t.Z., C.-l.L., Y.-d.W., D.-Z.L., Z.K.Z., Y.F., X.-c.Z. and H.S. performed specimen identification and morphological analyses. C.S., H.-h.C., X.-x.L., H.-r.Z., J.Y., R.-x.J., Q.F., W.-c.S., H.-y.Y., X.-f.L. and J.-p.Z. performed fossil photograph and Micro-XCT data analyses. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Supplementary Notes 1–8 and Figs. 1–30.
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Morphological matrix.
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Videos of the 3D reconstruction of the fossil specimens QUST-AM20501–14.
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Videos of the 3D reconstruction of the fossil specimens QUST-AM32413–16.
Supplementary Video 3
Videos of the 3D reconstruction of the fossil specimens QUST-AM32417, QUST-AM33310, QUST-AM32127 and QUST-AM33311.
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Shi, C., Wang, S., Cai, Hh. et al. Fire-prone Rhamnaceae with South African affinities in Cretaceous Myanmar amber. Nat. Plants 8, 125–135 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-021-01091-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-021-01091-w
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