Hello, sunshine

THIS brush-shaped fossil is the oldest known member of the daisy or sunflower family. Its colour and texture capture something of the feel of Vincent van Gogh’s famous paintings of the dying sunflowers, which were built up from thick ochre-coloured brushstrokes invoking the texture of petals and seed heads.

The sunflower is distinctive and unusual because what appears to be a single flower actually is a composite of numerous, simple flowers of varied shapes that are grouped together at the end of a stem, collectively acting as a single integrated entity. This compoundand also its alternative name , which comes from the classical Latin word , meaning ‘star’. Nearly 10% of the flowers in the world today belong to this family. With 27,400 species, the is second only to the orchids in size, yet measured against the long history of plant evolution, the rise of the sunflowers is a comparatively late phenomenon.