WFS

Formation of sedimentary layers of white clay, Tamilnadu, India

Fossil site for wood fossils, Tamilnadu, India

Fossil site in Kerala, India

Fossil wood park maintained by geological survey of India at Tamilnadu

Cretaceous fossil sites india

Fossils in rack:-Cyad

Fossils in rack:-echiniderms

Fossils in rack:-Rastellum sp

Pre-historic seabed, Cretaceous period

Ancient Elephant Fossil Discovered in New Mexico

June 14th, 2014

Riffin

Many crazy antics can happen at bachelor parties, but discovering an ancient fossil isn’t usually one of them. Well, that was the case for a group of campers celebrating a bachelor party at a New Mexico state park Monday, who stumbled upon the fossil of a 3-million-year-old elephant-like creature called a stegomastodon.

Many crazy antics can happen at bachelor parties, but discovering an ancient fossil isn’t usually one of them. Well, that was the case for a group of campers celebrating a bachelor party at a New Mexico state park Monday, who stumbled upon the fossil of a 3-million-year-old elephant-like creature called a stegomastodon. (Photo : Wikimedia Commons)

The stag group was at Elephant Butte Lake State Park, about 150 miles south of Albuquerque, N.M., when they saw something sticking out of the dirt.

“As we are cruising by we see a large tusk or what seems to be a large tusk coming out of the ground about a good three to four inches out,” Antonio Gradillas told KRQE News 13.

Gradillas and his friends started digging, turning this bachelor party into an archaeological dig. They soon alerted the New Mexico Natural History Museum of their discovery.

At first they thought it was a woolly mammoth, but paleontologists who later arrived on the scene say it looked more like a stegomastodon – a 9-foot tall, 13,000-pound prehistoric elephant that roamed the subtropical area millions of years ago.

To scientists’ delight, the fossil was nearly completely intact.

“This is far and away the best one we’ve ever found,” paleontologist Gary Morgan told Las Cruces Sun-News. “Maybe the only complete one found in New Mexico.”

Though they have not yet conclusively identified the fossil, it is most likely a stegomastodon from the Ice Age era (40 to 60 millions years ago) and was about 50 years old when it died. Though, the skull remains do not indicate its gender or cause of death. Experts say stegomastodons went extinct around 1.3 million years ago.

The area has been blocked off so a small team of paleontologists can work on excavating the fossil, which will then most likely be put on public display in the museum.

The excavation site will be refilled and open again for recreation as soon as the scientists are finished, added Kay Dunlap, the park’s superintendent.

Source:natureworldnews.com

‘Pocket sauropod’ sheds light on giant’s evolution

June 12th, 2014

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In a new study published in Journal of Systematic Palaeontology presents a detailed description of the skull bones of a dwarf sauropod, together with an updated reconstruction of an adult Europasaurus skull.

At 40 metres long and 100 tonnes in weight, and with an exceptionally long neck and small head, the herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs were the largest animals ever to have walked the Earth. In 2006, fossil remains of a diminutive form of sauropod – Europasaurus, measuring only 6 metres long and weighing just 0.8 tonnes – were discovered at a quarry in northern Germany. The fossils from the quarry are the best sauropod remains ever discovered, since they include most bones of the skull, as well as different growth stages.

In a new study published in Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, Martin Sander, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Steinmann-Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology of the University of Bonn, and colleagues present a detailed description of the skull bones of this dwarf sauropod, together with an updated reconstruction of an adult Europasaurus skull.

In the Late Jurassic, 150 million years ago, Europe was an archipelago, and most reptile fossils from the continent are those of marine species. The few dinosaur remains that have been found would have been washed into the sea from the islands of the archipelago. Europasaurus would have lived on one of these islands, evolving as a dwarf island species.

Earlier analysis of backbone remains had suggested the existence of two different types (sizes) of Europasaurus. The current study, in its extensive analysis of the skull remains, confirms this dimorphism.

There are several hypotheses for the dimophism observed in the Europasaurus remains. The two types could be examples of male and female sauropods. Another possibility is that populations from two different islands have been preserved in the quarry. A third theory is that the quarry has preserved two populations that were separated in time by several thousand years.

The study contributes to an understanding of the evolutionary dwarfing of Europasaurus, which in turn sheds light on the unique gigantism of sauropod dinosaurs. The fossils will continue to yield important insights into sauropod dinosaur evolution and biology for years to come, and researchers hope that new fossils will continue to be found at the quarry for many years to come.

Earthquakes due to volcanic pressure : A warning signal of Volcanic eruptions

June 11th, 2014

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Source: Wiley

New research in Geophysical Research Letters examines earthquake swarms caused by mounting volcanic pressure which may signal an imminent eruption. The research team studied Augustine Volcano in Alaska which erupted in 2006 and found that precursory earthquakes were caused by a block in the lava flow.

36 hours before the first magmatic explosions, a swarm of 54 earthquakes was detected across the 13-station seismic network on Augustine Island. By analyzing the resulting seismic waves, the authors found that the earthquakes were being triggered from sources within the volcano’s magma conduit.

Researchers studied Augustine Volcano in Alaska which erupted in 2006 and found that precursory earthquakes were caused by a block in the lava flow.
Credit: Alaska Volcano Observatory and photographer Cyrus Read.

“Our article talks about a special type of volcanic earthquake that we think is caused by lava breaking, something that usually can’t happen because lava is supposed to flow more like a liquid, rather than crack like a piece of rock,” said Dr. Helena Buurman from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Much like breaking a piece of chewing gum by stretching it really fast, lab tests show that hot lava can break when stretched quickly enough under certain pressures like those that you might find in the conduit of a volcano. “

The authors found that over the course of the two hour swarm, the earthquakes’ focus moved 35 meters deeper down into the magma conduit, an indication that the conduit was becoming clogged. The resulting buildup of pressure may have contributed to the explosive eruption the next day.

“We think that these earthquakes happened within the lava that was just beginning to erupt at the top of Augustine. The earthquakes show that the lava flow was grinding to a halt and plugging up the system. This caused pressure to build up from below, and resulted in a series of large explosions 36 hours later,” concluded Dr. Buurman. “We believe that these types of earthquakes can be used to signal that a volcano is becoming pressurized and getting ready to explode, giving scientists time to alert the public of an imminent eruption. “

Baltic amber deposits reveal A new species of flat bug from the genus Aradus preserved in amber

June 10th, 2014

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A piece of Eocene Baltic Amber of about 45 million years age contains a well preserved extinct flat bug, which turned out to be a new species to science. This exciting discovery is one of the many secrets that deposits of Baltic amber have revealed in the last years and are yet to come in the future. The study describing the new species was published in the open access journal Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift.

The new species Aradus macrosomus is a rather large representative of the genus, differing by its size and particular structures from its congeners. The name of the new species is chosen to reflect its unusual size and derives from the Greek words “macros” — large and “soma” — body.

Baltic Amber, a fossilized tree resin found on or near the shores of the eastern Baltic Sea, represents the largest deposit of amber in the world. It is exceptionally rich in well-preserved inclusions of botanical and zoological objects, particularly arthropods.

To date 14 species of the genus Aradus have been described from Baltic amber inclusions. Extant species of flat bugs commonly live on and under the bark of dead trees, which could be an explanation why so many species are well preserved in amber deposits.

First 3-D pterosaur eggs found with their parents

June 9th, 2014

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Researchers have discovered the first three-dimensionally preserved pterosaur eggs in China. The eggs were found among dozens, if not hundreds, of pterosaur fossils, representing a new genus and species (Hamipterus tianshanensis). The discovery, described in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on June 5, reveals that the pterosaurs — flying reptiles with wingspans ranging from 25 cm to 12 m — lived together in gregarious colonies.

Xiaolin Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology says it was most exciting to find many male and female pterosaurs and their eggs preserved together. “Five eggs are three-dimensionally preserved, and some are really complete,” he says.

This image depicts ecological reconstructions of Hamipterus.
Credit: Chuang Zhao

The fossil record of the pterosaurs has generally been poor, with little information about their populations, the researchers say. Prior to this latest find, only four isolated and flattened pterosaur eggs were known to science.

The resting place of the pterosaurs now described was first uncovered in 2005 in the Turpan-Hami Basin, south of the Tian Shan Mountains in Xinjiang, northwestern China. The fossil-rich area may harbor thousands of bones, including three-dimensional male and female skulls and the first three-dimensional eggs. Wang says that sediments in the area suggest that the pterosaurs died in a large storm about 120 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous period.

The researchers examined the largely intact pterosaur egg specimens to find that they were pliable, with a thin, calcareous eggshell outside and a soft, thick membrane inside, similar to the eggs of some modern-day snakes. The researchers’ observations of 40 male and female individuals suggest differences between the sexes in the size, shape, and robustness of their head crests.

The combination of many pterosaurs and eggs strongly indicates the presence of a nesting site nearby and indicates that this species developed gregarious behavior, the researchers say. Hamipterus most likely buried their eggs in sand along the shore of an ancient lake to prevent them from drying out. While the new fossils shed light on the reproductive strategy, development, and behavior of pterosaurs, there is still plenty left to learn about them.

“Sites like the one reported here provide further evidence regarding the behavior and biology of this amazing group of flying reptiles that has no parallel in modern time,” the researchers write.

Journal source: Xiaolin Wang, Alexander W.A. Kellner, Shunxing Jiang, Qiang Wang, Yingxia Ma, Yahefujiang Paidoula, Xin Cheng, Taissa Rodrigues, Xi Meng, Jialiang Zhang, Ning Li, Zhonghe Zhou. Sexually Dimorphic Tridimensionally Preserved Pterosaurs and Their Eggs from China. Current Biology, 2014;

Cell Press. “First 3-D pterosaur eggs found with their parents.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 June 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140605141459.htm>.

A 66 million year old forest fire sheds light on extinction of the dinosaurs

June 7th, 2014

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Source: McGill University

As far back as the time of the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, forests recovered from fires in the same manner they do today, according to a team of researchers from McGill University and the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.

McGill field crew collecting fossils as part of a field course in Grasslands National.
Credit: Larsson/Bamforth

During an expedition in southern Saskatchewan, Canada, the team discovered the first fossil-record evidence of forest fire ecology — the regrowth of plants after a fire — revealing a snapshot of the ecology on earth just before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. The researchers also found evidence that the region’s climate was much warmer and wetter than it is today.

“Excavating plant fossils preserved in rocks deposited during the last days of the dinosaurs, we found some preserved with abundant fossilized charcoal and others without it. From this, we were able to reconstruct what the Cretaceous forests looked like with and without fire disturbance,” says Hans Larsson, Canada Research Chair in Macroevolution at McGill University.

The researchers’ discovery revealed that at the forest fire site, the plants are dominated by flora quite similar to the kind that begin forest recovery after a fire today. Ancient forests recovered much like current ones, with plants like alder, birch, and sassafras present in early stages, and sequoia and ginkgo present in mature forests.

“We were looking at the direct result of a 66-million-year old forest fire, preserved in stone,” says Emily Bamforth, of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and the study’s first author. “Moreover, we now have evidence that the mean annual temperature in southern Saskatchewan was 10-12 degrees Celsius warmer than today, with almost six times as much precipitation.”

“The abundant plant fossils also allowed us for the first time to estimate climate conditions for the closing period of the dinosaurs in southwestern Canada, and provides one more clue to reveal what the ecology was like just before they went extinct,” says Larsson, who is also an Associate Professor at the Redpath Museum.

Forest fires can affect both plant and animal biodiversity. The team’s finding of ancient ecological recovery from a forest fire will help broaden scientists’ understanding of biodiversity immediately before the mass extinction of dinosaurs. “We won’t be able to fully understand the extinction dynamics until we understand what normal ecological processes were going on in the background.” says Larsson.

Scientists reconstruct ancient impact that dwarfs dinosaur-extinction blast

April 16th, 2014

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Picture this: A massive asteroid almost as wide as Rhode Island and about three to five times larger than the rock thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs slams into Earth. The collision punches a crater into the planet’s crust that’s nearly 500 kilometers (about 300 miles) across: greater than the distance from Washington, D.C. to New York City, and up to two and a half times larger in diameter than the hole formed by the dinosaur-killing asteroid. Seismic waves bigger than any recorded earthquakes shake the planet for about half an hour at any one location — about six times longer than the huge earthquake that struck Japan three years ago. The impact also sets off tsunamis many times deeper than the one that followed the Japanese quake.

Although scientists had previously hypothesized enormous ancient impacts, much greater than the one that may have eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, now a new study reveals the power and scale of a cataclysmic event some 3.26 billion years ago which is thought to have created geological features found in a South African region known as the Barberton greenstone belt. The research has been accepted for publication in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The huge impactor — between 37 and 58 kilometers (23 to 36 miles) wide — collided with the planet at 20 kilometers per second (12 miles per second). The jolt, bigger than a 10.8 magnitude earthquake, propelled seismic waves hundreds of kilometers through Earth, breaking rocks and setting off other large earthquakes. Tsunamis thousands of meters deep — far bigger than recent tsunamis generated by earthquakes — swept across the oceans that covered most of Earth at that time.

“We knew it was big, but we didn’t know how big,” Donald Lowe, a geologist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study, said of the asteroid.

Lowe, who discovered telltale rock formations in the Barberton greenstone a decade ago, thought their structure smacked of an asteroid impact. The new research models for the first time how big the asteroid was and the effect it had on the planet, including the possible initiation of a more modern plate tectonic system that is seen in the region, according to Lowe.

A graphical representation of the size of the asteroid thought to have killed the dinosaurs, and the crater it created, compared to an asteroid thought to have hit the Earth 3.26 billion years ago and the size of the crater it may have generated. A new study reveals the power and scale of the event some 3.26 billion years ago which scientists think created geological features found in a South African region known as the Barberton greenstone belt.
Credit: Image courtesy of American Geophysical Union

The study marks the first time scientists have mapped in this way an impact that occurred more than 3 billion years ago, Lowe added, and is likely one of the first times anyone has modeled any impact that occurred during this period of Earth’s evolution.

The impact would have been catastrophic to the surface environment. The smaller, dino-killing asteroid crash is estimated to have released more than a billion times more energy than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The more ancient hit now coming to light would have released much more energy, experts said.

The sky would have become red hot, the atmosphere would have been filled with dust and the tops of oceans would have boiled, the researchers said. The impact sent vaporized rock into the atmosphere, which encircled the globe and condensed into liquid droplets before solidifying and falling to the surface, according to the researchers.

The impact may have been one of dozens of huge asteroids that scientists think hit Earth during the tail end of the Late Heavy Bombardment period, a major period of impacts that occurred early in Earth’s history — around 3 billion to 4 billion years ago.

Many of the sites where these asteroids landed were destroyed by erosion, movement Earth’s crust and other forces as Earth evolved, but geologists have found a handful of areas in South Africa, and Western Australia that still harbor evidence of these impacts that occurred between 3.23 billion and 3.47 billion years ago. The study’s co-authors think the asteroid hit Earth thousands of kilometers away from the Barberton Greenstone Belt, although they can’t pinpoint the exact location.

“We can’t go to the impact sites. In order to better understand how big it was and its effect we need studies like this,” said Lowe. Scientists must use the geological evidence of these impacts to piece together what happened to the Earth during this time, he said.

The study’s findings have important implications for understanding the early Earth and how the planet formed. The impact may have disrupted Earth’s crust and the tectonic regime that characterized the early planet, leading to the start of a more modern plate tectonic system, according to the paper’s co-authors.

The pummeling the planet endured was “much larger than any ordinary earthquake,” said Norman Sleep, a physicist at Stanford University and co-author of the study. He used physics, models, and knowledge about the formations in the Barberton greenstone belt, other earthquakes and other asteroid impact sites on Earth and the moon to calculate the strength and duration of the shaking that the asteroid produced. Using this information, Sleep recreated how waves traveled from the impact site to the Barberton greenstone belt and caused the geological formations.

The geological evidence found in the Barberton that the paper investigates indicates that the asteroid was “far larger than anything in the last billion years,” said Jay Melosh, a professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who was not involved in the research.

The Barberton greenstone belt is an area 100 kilometers (62 miles) long and 60 kilometers (37 miles) wide that sits east of Johannesburg near the border with Swaziland. It contains some of the oldest rocks on the planet.

The model provides evidence for the rock formations and crustal fractures that scientists have discovered in the Barberton greenstone belt, said Frank Kyte, a geologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study.

“This is providing significant support for the idea that the impact may have been responsible for this major shift in tectonics,” he said.

Reconstructing the asteroid’s impact could also help scientists better understand the conditions under which early life on the planet evolved, the paper’s authors said. Along with altering Earth itself, the environmental changes triggered by the impact may have wiped out many microscopic organisms living on the developing planet, allowing other organisms to evolve, they said.

“We are trying to understand the forces that shaped our planet early in its evolution and the environments in which life evolved,” Lowe said.

Source:Norman H. Sleep, Donald R. Lowe. Physics of crustal fracturing and chert dike formation triggered by asteroid impact, ~3.26 Ga, Barberton greenstone belt, South Africa. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 2014; DOI: 10.1002/2014GC005229

Extinct carnivorous marsupial Nimbacinus dicksoni may have hunted prey larger than itself

April 15th, 2014

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The reconstruction of an extinct meat-eating marsupial’s skull, Nimbacinus dicksoni, suggests that it may have had the ability to hunt vertebrate prey exceeding its own body size, according to results published April 9, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Marie Attard from the University of New England together with colleagues from the University of New South Wales.

This is an illustration of Mid Miocene Nimbacinus dicksoni.
Credit: Anne Musser

Nimbacinus dicksoni is a member of an extinct family of Australian and New Guinean marsupial carnivores, Thylacinidae. Aside from one recently extinct species, the majority of information known about species in this family stems from recovered skull fragments, which limits species ecology and diversity analysis. Scientists recovered a ~16-11.6 million year old preserved skull of N. dicksoni from the Riversleigh World Heritage Fossil Site in northwestern Queensland, Australia, and used it to determine if N. dicksoni was more likely to hunt small or large prey. They applied virtual 3D reconstruction techniques and computer modelling to reconstruct the skull of Nimbacinus, digitally ‘crash-testing’ and comparing it to models of large living marsupial carnivores (Tasmanian devil, spotted-tailed quoll and northern quoll), and to the recently extinct Tasmanian tiger, N. dicksoni‘s close relative.

The authors found that the similarity in mechanical performance of the skull between N. dicksoni and the largest quoll, the spotted-tailed quoll, was greater than the similarity to the Tasmanian tiger. The authors suggest that N. dicksoni, a medium-sized marsupial (about 5 kg), had a high bite force for its size, was predominantly carnivorous, and was likely capable of hunting vertebrate prey that exceeded its own body mass.

“Our findings suggest that Nimbacinus dicksoni was an opportunistic hunter, with potential prey including birds, frogs, lizards and snakes, as well as a wide range of marsupials. In contrast, the iconic Tasmanian tiger was considerably more specialized than large living dasyurids and Nimbacinus, and was likely more restricted in the range of prey it could hunt, making it more vulnerable to extinction.” Dr Attard explains.

Lone survivor of catastrophic meteor impact 65 million years ago?

April 13th, 2014

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A team of scientists has discovered the youngest dinosaur preserved in the fossil record before the catastrophic meteor impact 65 million years ago. The finding indicates that dinosaurs did not go extinct prior to the impact and provides further evidence as to whether the impact was in fact the cause of their extinction. Researchers from Yale University discovered the fossilized horn of a ceratopsian — likely a Triceratops, which are common to the area — in the Hell Creek formation in Montana last year. They found the fossil buried just five inches below the K-T boundary, the geological layer that marks the transition from the Cretaceous period to the Tertiary period at the time of the mass extinction that took place 65 million years ago. Since the impact hypothesis for the demise of the dinosaurs was first proposed more than 30 years ago, many scientists have come to believe the meteor caused the mass extinction and wiped out the dinosaurs, but a sticking point has been an apparent lack of fossils buried within the 10 feet of rock below the K-T boundary.

Three small primitive mammals walk over a Triceratops skeleton, one of the last dinosaurs to exist before the mass extinction that gave way to the age of mammals.
Credit: Mark Hallett

The seeming anomaly has come to be known as the “three-meter gap.” Until now, this gap has caused some paleontologists to question whether the non-avian dinosaurs of the era — which included Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Torosaurus and the duckbilled dinosaurs — gradually went extinct sometime before the meteor struck. (Avian dinosaurs survived the impact, and eventually gave rise to modern-day birds.) “This discovery suggests the three-meter gap doesn’t exist,” said Yale graduate student Tyler Lyson, director of the Marmarth Research Foundation and lead author of the study, published online July 12 in the journal Biology Letters. “The fact that this specimen was so close to the boundary indicates that at least some dinosaurs were doing fine right up until the impact.” While the team can’t determine the exact age of the dinosaur, Lyson said it likely lived tens of thousands to just a few thousand years before the impact. “This discovery provides some evidence that dinosaurs didn’t slowly die out before the meteor struck,” he said. Eric Sargis, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and graduate student Stephen Chester discovered the ceratopsian last year while searching for fossilized mammals that evolved after the meteor impact.

At first, Lyson said, the team thought it was buried within about three feet of the K-T boundary, but were surprised to learn just how close to the boundary — and hence, how close in time to the impact — it was. They sent soil samples to a laboratory to determine the exact location of the boundary, which is marked by the relative abundance of certain types of fossilized pollen and other geological indicators but is difficult to determine visually while in the field. Because the dinosaur was buried in a mudstone floodplain, the team knew it hadn’t been re-deposited from older sediments, which can sometimes happen when fossils are found in riverbeds that may have eroded and re-distributed material over time.

The team is now examining other fossil specimens that appear to be buried close to the K-T boundary and expect to find more, Lyson said. He suspects that other fossils discovered in the past may have been closer to the boundary than originally thought and that the so-called three-meter gap never existed. “We should be able to verify that using the more sophisticated soil analysis technique rather than estimating the boundary’s location based solely on a visual examination of the rock formations while in the field, which is what has typically been done in the past,” Lyson said. Other authors of the paper include Eric Sargis and Stephen Chester (Yale University); Antoine Bercovici (China University of Geosciences); Dean Pearson (Pioneer Trails Regional Museum) and Walter Joyce (University of Tübingen).

Extinct plants ‘back to life’ through colour rendering

April 12th, 2014

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Jeff Benca is an admitted über-geek when it comes to prehistoric plants, so it was no surprise that, when he submitted a paper describing a new species of long-extinct lycopod for publication, he ditched the standard line drawing and insisted on a detailed and beautifully rendered color reconstruction of the plant. This piece earned the cover of March’s centennial issue of the American Journal of Botany.

Benca described this 400-million-year-old fossil lycopod, Leclercqia scolopendra, and created a life-like computer rendering. The stem of the lycopod is about 2.5 millimeters across.

“Typically, when you see pictures of early land plants, they’re not that sexy: there is a green forking stick and that’s about it. We don’t have many thorough reconstructions,” said Benca, a graduate student in the Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley. “I wanted to give an impression of what they may have really looked like. There are great color reconstructions of dinosaurs, so why not a plant?”

Benca’s realistic, full-color image could be a life portrait, except for the fact that it was drawn from a plant that lay flattened and compressed into rock for more than 375 million years.

Called Leclercqia scolopendra, or centipede clubmoss, the plant lived during the “age of fishes,” the Devonian Period. At that time, lycopods — the group Leclercqia belonged to — were one of few plant lineages with leaves. Leclercqia shoots were about a quarter-inch in diameter and probably formed prickly, scrambling, ground-covering mats. The function of Leclercqia‘s hook-like leaf tips is unclear, Benca said, but they may have been used to clamber over larger plants. Today, lycopods are represented by a group of inconspicuous plants called club mosses, quillworts and spikemosses.

Both living and extinct lycopods have fascinated Benca since high school. When he came to UC Berkeley last year from the University of Washington, he brought a truckload of some 70 different species, now part of collections at the UC Botanical Garden.

Now working in the paleobotany lab of Cindy Looy, Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology, Benca continues to establish a growing list of living lycopod species, several of which will eventually be incorporated into the UC and Jepson Herbaria collections.

Visualizing plant evolution

Benca and colleagues wrote their paper primarily to demonstrate a new technique that is helping paleobotanists interpret early land plant fossils with greater confidence. Since living clubmosses share many traits with early lycopods, the research team was able to test their methods using living relatives Benca was growing in greenhouses.

Benca described this 400-million-year-old fossil lycopod, Leclercqia scolopendra, and created a life-like computer rendering. The stem of the lycopod is about 2.5 millimeters across.
Credit: Image courtesy of University of California – Berkeley

Early land plant fossils are not easy to come by, but they can be abundant in places where rocks from the Devonian Period form outcrops. But a large portion of these are just stem fragments with few diagnostic features to distinguish them, Benca said.

“The way we analyzed Leclercqia material makes it possible to gain more information from these fragments, increasing our sample size of discernible fossils,” he said.

“Getting a better grip on just how diverse and variable Devonian plants were will be important to understanding the origins of key traits we see in so many plants today.” Looy said. Benca’s co-authors are Maureen H. Carlisle, Silas Bergen and Caroline A. E. Strömberg from the University of Washington and Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Seattle.