The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin has awarded this year’s von Pawel-Rammingen Promotionspreis to Simon Beurel for his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Reconstructing fossil-rich East Asian amber forests using inclusions of seed plants”. Beurel re-examined plant inclusions in 100-million-year-old Cretaceous amber from Myanmar, thereby supporting the hypothesis that flowering plants originated in the Mesozoic Era. With this award, the Research Museum not only honours outstanding individual achievements, but also reaffirms its confidence in the quality and originality of young researchers and the future viability of science at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
“I am delighted to receive the von Pawel-Rammingen Dissertation Award and would like to thank everyone for their support, especially my supervisor Eva-Maria Sadowski from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.”
Beurel’s work especially sheds much new light on the evolution of flowering plants and the habitats in which they thrived. His innovative uses of microCT and synchrotron X-ray computed tomography allowed him to reconstruct in exquisite detail the three-dimensional structure of angiosperm flowers preserved in amber. Beurel reidentified plant inclusions from 100-million-year-old amber in Myanmar, which had previously been incorrectly identified as belonging to a plant group that still exists today. This previous misidentification had led to the assumption of an unrealistically long evolutionary history of flowering plants. Beurel’s meticulous study has now shown that these amber fossils actually represent a previously unidentified lineage of early diverging angiosperms, which refutes the hypothesis of a Permian origin for flowering plants. The amber specimens examined, containing the newly described inclusions, have been added to the research collection of the Museum of Natural History and are now available worldwide for further investigation.
Additional Information
The von Pawel Rammingen Dissertation Award is a scientific award established by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and funded by the Pawel Rammingen Foundation. It bears the name of the founding couple and, since its inception, has honoured the outstanding scientific achievements of Ph.D. students at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. The aim of the prize is to promote excellence among young scientists, raise the profile of research at the Museum für Naturkunde and further increase the institution's attractiveness as a place to pursue a doctorate. In this way, it makes an important contribution to recruiting young talent and provides long-term support to the prize winners on their path to a successful scientific career. With this prize, the museum not only honours outstanding individual achievements, but also reaffirms its confidence in the quality and originality of young research and the future viability of science at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
