The discovery of ancient plant fossils indicates that these plants lived during the late Eocene.
Nationalgeographic.co.id—Paleobotanists from Simon Fraser University provide new clues about ancient plants that lived in the Burnaby Mountains (British Columbia, Canada) 40 million years ago. The plants lived during the late Eocene epoch, when the climate was much warmer than it is today.
The results of the analysis of plant fossils by researchers have been published in International Journal of Plant Sciences recently. The paper was published under the title “Plant Megafossils, Palynomorphs, and Paleoenvironment from the Late Middle to Late Eocene Burnaby Mountain Flora, Huntingdon Formation, British Columbia, Canada” which can be obtained online.
Rolf Mathewes, a paleobotanist at Simon Fraser University said, and his undergraduate mentor, professor Robert C. Brooke, discovered and collected plant fossils from deposits exposed during the university’s construction in the late 1960s.
The fossil was then housed at Simon Fraser University but remained locked in a cupboard for many years. Until then Mathews returned to his collection as a professor.
Mathewes later dedicated the journal he published to the memory of Brooke, his late supervisor and mentor.
The research premise is that the fossil flora of the Eocene epoch in the area around Vancouver, British Columbia, is little known even though work began in the 1890s to 1920s.
Previously unstudied floristic characters of the Burnaby Mountains flora of the Huntingdon Formation in British Columbia were reconstructed using plant megafossils and palinology.
One of the fossils identified by their colleague David Greenwood, of the University of Brandon, was a palm leaf fragment.
“This site offers insight into terrestrial vegetation and paleoclimate during the late middle to late Eocene in the Pacific Northwest of North America in a coastal environment during a global cooling trend,” the researchers wrote.
The research team also identified hydrangeas and other extinct flowering plants from the same family as basswood, a tree native to Eastern North America.
Microscopic analysis of fossil pollen extracted from fine shale also revealed the presence of alder, ferns, elms, sweetgum and many other plants.
The methodology the researchers used identified megaflora and microflora and combined flora compared with their counterparts from northwest Washington.
