case, that's impossible. The specimen was collected more than 40 years ago by Kwang Pan, a coal engineer who became a self-taught fossil expert after he was sent to the remote village of Sanjiaocheng, in China's Liaoning province, Wang said. Pan donated the fossil to the researchers.

Paleobotanists are leery of claims regarding the 'oldest flower fossil', because the field was recently burned by a misdated fossil. In 2002, scientists reported a 144-million-year-old Archaefructus angiosperm fossil from China, which made a splashy debut on the cover of the journal Science, but the fossil was later redated to 124.6 million years old.

"This is our strongest evidence of Jurassic angiosperms that we have at this time, but it is tentative," Taylor said of the new fossil. "If this was in theCretaceous, no one would be arguing about it, but because it's in the Jurassic, you need to have more evidence."

Rare find

Wang said that Pan carefully documented his collections, and fossils and volcanic ash found in the same rock layers confirm the flower was entombed during the Jurassic period. The fossil was named Euanthus panii; the first name is Latin for "real flower," and the second name is in honor of Pan.

Image: Liu & Wang, Historical Biology

"I believe that as more fossils are documented from the Jurassic or earlier times, we will develop a new picture of angiosperm evolution that is completely different than what we had for the last 100 years," Wang said.

Wang and lead author Zhong-Jian Liu, of the National Orchid Conservation Center of China, placed the