Park
University paleobotanist Patty Ryberg and her colleagues are uncovering the fossilized remains of a lush forest that thrived in the Antarctic Circle some 260 million years ago during the Permian period.
Not exact matches
But in cladoxylopsids, «each strand of xylem had its own growth rings,» says
paleobotanist Christopher M. Berry of Cardiff
University in Wales, who co-authored the study with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing and Binghamton
University, S.U.N.Y.
«Explaining these glaciations has always been a problem,» says Charles Wellman, a
paleobotanist at the
University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the new work.
«I think they're perfectly right,» says Gregory Retallack, a
paleobotanist at the
University of Oregon, Eugene.
Like Mellaart,
paleobotanists Christine Hastorf and Julie Near of the
University of California at Berkeley have found wheat, barley, lentils, and peas at Çatalhöyük.
Scientists imagined they were big, but not that big, says William Stein,
paleobotanist at Binghamton
University in upstate New York.
Now researchers may be able to get around this lack of fossils by looking at insect damage instead, says Leo Hickey, a
paleobotanist at Yale
University: «The work shows the potential of an overlooked resource in [studying] the evolution of insects.»
The particular pollen they found in the insects» guts, says
paleobotanist Bill Chaloner of the
University of London, was adapted for wind dispersal, and the bugs could have «inadvertently consumed the pollen while foraging for other plant tissue.»
University of Maryland doctoral student Nathan Jud, a
paleobotanist — an expert in plant fossils and their environments — identified the species and its significance.
The new study is an important step in solving several such mysteries about early Earth, says Brigitte Meyer - Berthaud, a
paleobotanist at the
University of Montpellier in France who was not involved in the research.
It's «a beautiful little experiment,» says
paleobotanist Peter Wilf of Pennsylvania State
University in State College, who notes that the strategy gives mosses a way to propagate in dry places.
«The importance of vein density has never before been so clearly presented,» says Peter Wilf, a
paleobotanist at Pennsylvania State
University,
University Park.
But last May,
paleobotanists at the Florida Museum of Natural History and at Jilin
University in Changchun, China, announced fossil remains of «probably the most complete, oldest flowering plant in the world,» says David Dilcher, a scientist who analyzed the 125 - million - year - old fossils.