Examples of seeds/fruits from the Dori’sTuff flora, Jose Creek Formation, New Mexico, showing tiny seeds (upper left) to large fruits scattered in mass. The scale bar is 1 cm.
DALLAS, TX.- A unique cache of plant fossils from volcanic deposits in New Mexico contradicts the common narrative that flowering plants, which now dominate the earth’s flora, had more limited roles in the ecology of Earth’s forests before dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years ago. New research shows surprisingly large seeds and fleshy fruits in a dense flowering-plant dominated forest, preserved in a “botanical Pompeii” that happened nearly 10 million years before a catastrophic asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs.
The discovery was made by a multi-institutional team of scientists, led by UC Berkeley doctoral student Jaemin Lee, and includes critical work by Perot Museum of Nature and Science’s Director of Paleontology & Curator of Paleobotany and co-author Dr. Dori L. Contreras that began during her doctoral work at the university…