An ancient 80-million-year-old fossil plant rewrites the history of lamiids, revealing that these flowering plants, including staple crops, evolved earlier than previously believed and suggesting complex rainforests may have existed 80 million years ago. The discovery of an 80-million-year-old fo
Image of fruit belonging to Palaeophytocrene chicoensis. The Sierra College Museum of Natural History is the permanent repository for this fossil. Credit: Brian Atkinson
According to the KU researcher, the fossil fruit sheds new light on a “critical interval” in the history of life on Earth. “I spent seven years looking for these things [Cretaceous lamiids], and I couldn’t find them,” Atkinson said. “I’d been collecting and studying Cretaceous plants on the West Coast to better understand the evolution of flowering plants. Somebody said, ‘Oh, you should check out the Sierra College Museum of Natural History,’ as it wasn’t on my radar to contact them.
To confirm his thinking about the fossil, Atkinson needed to take a closer look. He studied the fossil fruit’s structures using light microscopy, which allowed him to generate beautiful photographs of the specimen. By scrutinizing its arrangement of ridges, pits, rows, and tubercles, the KU investigator could make comparisons to previously described fossils to place it correctly within its family tree. The work challenged Atkinson because he’d never described a “compression fossil” of its kind.
“I just named it after the formation it was recovered from,” he said. “Part of my job is coming up with scientific names for new species that I describe, but I’m not that creative about it — usually I look up the location where it was discovered. Has that name been taken already?”
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