Phys.org has a story about the identification of some Indian plant fossils as ancestors of the Frankincense and Myrrh family.  The fossils were discovered in an Indian village in the early 1970’s. Recently. researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History performed CT scans on these fossils.  The scans revealed pyrenes.  Pyrenes are woody dispersal pods that proved protection to seeds… modern day examples include the hard stones at the cores of cherries, peaches, dates, and pistachios.  Only a few plant families produce pyrenes and even less arrange groups of five in the shape of a pentagram.  By process of elimination, the family w, as determined to be Burseraceae, the Frankincense family.  The details can be found in the paper “Burseraceae in Cretaceous of India”, which was published in the International Journal of Plant Sciences.

Most fossils from the Frankincense family have, up until now, been recovered from rocks that postdate the asteroid impact. The original fruits discovered in the 1970s were fossilized before that event. This makes them the oldest Burseraceae fossils discovered to date, which has important implications for the family’s origin. Scientists have a good idea of when plants in the group initially evolved, but it’s still unclear where they came from.

Ancient species of Burseraceae are a common component of fossil beds in southern England, the Czech Republic and parts of North America. Beginning roughly 50 million years ago, however, Earth’s climate began a long cooling process that ultimately resulted in the most recent Ice Ages. As temperatures fell, species in the Frankincense family seemed to reverse their preference for hemispheres. Today, there are more than 700 Burseraceae species, and most of them grow south of the equator.

The ancestors of modern Burseraceae species are thought to have first appeared somewhere in the north. Alternatively, a few early species may have had a global distribution but became isolated as continents drifted apart.

The fossils from India suggest the southern hemisphere may have been the real birthplace of the family.