Ancient poisonous flower trapped in amber a cousin to strychnine - CNET

Most of those hundreds of amber samples contained insects, but the flowers caught Poinar's eye. "These flowers looked like they had just fallen from a tree," he said in a statement. "I thought they might be Strychnos, and I sent them to Lena because I knew she was an expert in that genus."

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The pair's findings appear in the latest issue of the joual Nature Plants.

Though plant fossils found in amber are usually fragments such as petals and stamens, these flowers showed up intact. Poinar, a professor emeritus of integrative biology at Oregon State University, started by showing Struwe high-resolution photos of the trapped flower specimens.

After confirming that the specimens belonged to the Strychnos genus, Struwe went on to physically compare them, in exacting detail, with recent dried specimens from the category. That's how she ascertained the flowers in amber couldn't be categorized as a known species of Strychnos.

"I looked at each specimen of New World species, photographed and measured it, and compared it to the photo George sent me," Struwe said. "I asked myself, 'How do the hairs on the petals look?' 'Where are the hairs situated?' and so on."