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In a paper published in Historical Biology, George Poinar Jr. of the Oregon State College of Science describes a pine cone, approximately 40 million years old, encased in Baltic amber from which several embryonic stems are emerging.

"Crucial to the development of all plants, seed germination typically occurs in the ground after a seed has fallen," said Poinar, an international expert in using plant and animal life forms preserved in amber to learn about the biology and ecology of the distant past. "We tend to associate viviparity – embryonic development while still inside the parent – with animals and forget that it does sometimes occur in plants."

Most typically, by far, those occurrences involve angiosperms, Poinar said. Angiosperms, which directly or indirectly provide most of the food people eat, have flowers and produce seeds enclosed in fruit.

"Seed germination in fruits is fairly common in plants that lack seed dormancy, like tomatoes, peppers and grapefruit, and it happens for a variety of reasons," he said. "But it's rare in gymnosperms."

Gymnosperms such as conifers produce "naked," or non-enclosed, seeds. Precocious germination in pine cones is so rare that only one naturally occurring example of this condition, from 1965, has been described in the scientific literature, Poinar said.

"That's part of what makes this discovery so intriguing, even beyond that it's the first fossil record of plant viviparity involving seed germination," he said. "I find it fascinating that the seeds in this small pine cone could start to germinate inside the cone and the sprouts could grow out so far before they perished in the resin."

Title		OSU Study Yields a First in Fossil Research: Seeds Sprouting From an Amber-Encased Pine Cone
Date		Friday November 19 2021, @01:04AM
Author		janrinok
Topic
from the no,-not-that-kind-of-germy-nation dept.

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