You've heard of a Venus flytrap, but what about a HUMAN trap?

An extinct, ancient, flesh-eating plant has been recently discovered via fossilized leaves that were preserved in Baltic amber which was found in a mine near Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave situated on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The plant is thought to be related to the Roridula "flypaper trap" plant that is found in South Africa.

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This new plant grew in Europe about 40 million years ago, and is known from multi-cellular stalked glands and single cell hairs that were found in the amber.

The Roridula catches its prey, comprised mostly of insects, with leaves that are covered in sticky, glue-like material which is produced in the glands and tentacles of the plant.

This is similar to residue found on the Russian plant's leaves, and this shows evidence that just like the Roridula, the extinct plant would use the glue-like material to trap prey before covering them in digestive enzymes which would allow the lead to absorb nutrients from the digesting prey.

Dr. Eva-Maria Sadowski, a scientist with Gottingen University in Germany, believes that this may be the first case of a carnivorous plant being fossilized.

"Amber-fossil tree resin-preserves organisms in microscopic fidelity and frequently fossils preserved in amber are otherwise absent in the entire fossil record," she said.

"Plant remains, however, are rarely entrapped in amber, compared with the vast amount of insects and other animals."

The discovery was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the researchers who are responsible for the find date that fossil to between 35 and 47 million years ago, during the Eocene period.

"Our newly discovered fossils from Eocene Baltic amber are the only documented case of fossilized carnivorous plant traps and represent the first fossil evidence of the carnivorous plant family Roridulaceae, which is today a narrow endemic of South Africa," Sadowski said.

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