Prehistoric Coffee Ancestor Found in Amber

Fossil flowers found perfectly preserved in amber represent a new plant species that’s a 45-million-year-old relative of coffee, according to new research.

Named Strychnos electri, after the Greek word for amber (electron), the flowers represent the first-ever fossils of an asterid, which is a family of flowering plants that not only later gave us coffee, but also sunflowers, peppers, potatoes, mint — and deadly poisons.

The flowers, described in the journal Nature Plants, belong to the dark side of the family. They are in the genus Strychnos, which ultimately gave rise to some of the world’s most famous poisons, including strychnine and curare. The prehistoric flowers’ attractiveness and incredible state of preservation belie their toxicity.

“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, palms, grasses and other vegetation,” said Oregon State professor George Poinar, Jr., an expert in plant and animal life forms preserved in amber, in a release.

“Specimens such as this are what give us insights into the ecology of ecosystems in the distant past,” he continued. “It shows that the asterids, which later gave humans all types of foods and other products, were already evolving many millions of years ago.”

Poinar and his team recently made the discovery while analyzing amber that had been collected in the Dominican Republic in 1986. He and his colleagues explained that asterids are among Earth’s most important and diverse plants, with 10 orders, 98 families, and about 80,000 species. They represent about one-third of all the earth’s diversity of angiosperms, or flowering plants.

The new find shows that plants in the very poisonous genus existed for many millions of years before humans evolved from our primate ancestors.

Humans have clearly since put asterids to good use, considering how common the edible ones are in our diets. As for the poisonous plants, their toxic compounds have been added to blow-gun weapons, rat control, and have even been featured in classic murder mysteries such as Sherlock Holmes stories and the movie “Psycho.”

Read more at Discovery News