Once she had the fossil flower in hand, Sadowski polished the amber block with a damp leather cloth and toothpaste – a technique she picked up from her doctoral adviser, Alexander Schmidt, who learnt some of his methods from a dentist.

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Under a powerful microscope, Sadowski saw perfectly preserved details of the flower’s anatomy, along with specks of pollen. She used the pollen to see if the plant had been sorted into the correct family 150 years ago.

Sadowski scraped grains from near the amber’s surface with a scalpel. “I only do that on a very quiet morning in my office, where no one disturbs me. You need steady hands, no shaking,” she said.

After isolating and imaging the grains, her co-author on the study, Christa-Charlotte Hofmann at the University of Vienna, investigated the pollen, along with microscopic features of the flower’s anatomy. That pointed to an entirely different genus group than the one that had been assigned in 1872: Symplocos, a genus of flowering shrubs and small trees not found in Europe today but widespread in modern East Asia.

The redesignation of the giant flower helps to flesh out what scientists know about the ecological diversity of the Baltic amber forest. It also sheds light on how Earth’s climate has changed over the last 35 million-odd years: the presence of Symplocos helps to show that ancient Europe was balmier than it has been for most of human history.

“These tiny grains are natural recorders of past climates and ecosystems that can help us measure how much our planet has changed in the past due to natural [non-human] causes,” said Regan Dunn, a paleobotanist at La Brea Tar Pits and Museum who was not involved with the research. “This allows us to better understand just how much our species is impacting the planet.”

While “Jurassic Park” enthusiasts may be disappointed to learn that there’s no chance of getting DNA from the amber flower, George Poinar jnr, a scientist whose work inspired the series, said there are bound to be more breakthroughs. In the nearly 50 years he’s been studying amber, advances in microscopy have made once-hidden details of ancient organisms dramatic and clear.

“I think that’s fascinating, for people to see life like that,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.