Crinoid fossils are most commonly found in limestone ... creating patterns that resemble tiny, intricate stars or flowers. In some regions, these fossilized fragments are so abundant that they ...

The fossil was created when some sticky sap trickled out of a conifer tree near the Baltic Sea, coating the flower and solidifying it into amber over time. It is very uncommon to see plants ...

As a result, modern paleobotany has undergone a boom not unlike the Cretaceous flower explosion itself. Now old-style fossil hunters with shovels and microscopes compare notes with molecular ...

See G.O. Poinar et al., “Tropidogyne pentaptera, sp. nov., a new mid-Cretaceous fossil angiosperm flower in Burmese amber,” Palaeodiversity, 10:135-40, 2017.

But in 1998, this ancient plant discovered in the fossil beds of Liaoning Province in northeastern China graced the cover of Science and made headlines worldwide. It was heralded as the earliest ...