Tag: paleobotany
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PBS Eons: When the Rainforests Collapsed
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the plants during the Carboniferous Period. That’s the same time period as Mazon Creek! This episode discusses one of just two mass extinctions of plants in the fossil record. Spoiler… Climate Change played a big role. The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse set the stage for…
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In Defense of Plants: The Rise and Fall of the Scale Trees
I recently ran into an interesting post on the blog “In Defense of Plants”. It’s called “The Rise and Fall of the Scale Trees”. If you collect or are familiar with Mazon Creek fossils, you probably have heard of Lepidodendron, Stigmaria, Psaronius, Cyperites. etc. You might even have a few of these fossils. Some of…
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Reminder: ESCONI September General Meeting on September 13th, 2019 at 8:00 PM
The speaker at our September 13, 2019 meeting will be Dr. Ashley Klymiuk, Collections Manager, Paleobotany, at the Field Museum. The topic of her talk will be “Fossils from the Fifth Kingdom: from moulds to mycorrhizae”. Come on out… it should be very interesting! Here is a link to a ScienceDaily article about some of…
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SciNews: Devonian Fossil Forest Unearthed in China
SciNews has a post about a Devonian aged fossil forest discovered in China. The fossilized forest dates to 360 million years ago and was found near Xinhang in China’s Anhui province. It is the oldest known fossil forest in Asia. A paper describing the fossils appeared in the journal Current Biology. The Xinhang forest covered…
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ESCONI September General Meeting on September 13th, 2019 at 8:00 PM
The speaker at our September 13, 2019 meeting will be Dr. Ashley Klymiuk, Collections Manager, Paleobotany, at the Field Museum. The topic of her talk will be fossil fungi. Come on out… it should be very interesting! Dr. Az Klymiuk is a Métis Canadian botanist, mycologist, and paleontologist. Her research comprises comparative plant anatomy of…
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Scientists May Have Wildly Underestimated the Giant Dinosaurs of the Ancient World
LiveScience has an interesting story about sauropod dinosaurs. It seems that their leafy meals were probably a whole lot more hearty, wholesome, and nutrient packed than previously thought. This research appeared in the journal Palaeontology. The conventional wisdom about the big plant-eating dinosaurs, like Brachiosaurus and Argentinosaurus, is that they had to eat huge…
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Rainforest collapse 307 million years ago impacted the evolution of early land vertebrates
Phys.org has a story about a mass extinction in plants that occurred during the Pennsylvannian Period. Researchers from the University of Birmingham published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The mass extinction seems to have been caused by the onset of a drier climate 307 million years ago. This led to…
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Smithsonian: Ancient Trees “Ripped Their Skeletons Apart” To Grow
The Smithsonian.com has an article about how the ancient “trees” grew. Researchers from Cardiff University, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, and State University of New York have published a paper in PNAS which studied 374 million year old fossils of a group of “trees” known as cladoxylopsids. The team’s findings, published in Proceedings of…
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The End of Petrified Wood Collecting on Public Lands?
SaveFossilCollecting has a post about the new proposed fossil collecting regulations on public lands. The article does a good job explaining the issue. Additionally, there are other informative posts on the website. Petrified wood represents a stone of unique interest in the hearts and minds of the many collectors found in virtually every part of…
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Researcher uncovers oldest amber ever recorded: The Mystery of Illinois Amber
Via NYTimes: Hat tip: Mark White
