This is a photograph of a model from the Field Museum of Natural History, representing a cycad flower reconstructed from a fossil.
The fossil came from the Cycad National Monument, established by President Harding in the Black Hills of Dakota, and shows the primordial flowering structure of a plant that’s far older than the “true” flowering plants, at least 100 million years ago. It’s a dinosaur flower, a flower from before flowers, a flower so old it might as well be an alien flower. It’s still pretty.
I found the image in B.E. Dahlgren’s pamphlet, “A Fossil Flower,” preserved in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.