After reading Thomas Mcloughlin’s A Guide to Pennsylvanian Age Plant Fossils, I was intrigued by the implications that analyzing plant fossils had. These are my thoughts.
Thomas Mcloughlin’s A Guide to Pennsylvanian (Carboniferous) Age Plant Fossils of Southwest Virginia is a wonderful picture guide to the plant fossils of the Central Appalachian coalfields, as well as a few fossils of small marine creatures.
It is also meticulously curated and cataloged for both experts and newcomers to the field of paleobotany, which is the scientific study of fossilized plants. When you open the book, you will not be confused as compared to when you encounter other large scientific atlases of this kind. Every fossil is sorted according to its category and its classification, and the range of where they are commonly found is also noted beside every specimen. Beneath each categorical entry, small but concise text is found that gives a quick and sufficient description.
More than simply an informative book full of facts and trivia, A Guide to Pennsylvanian Age Plant Fossils is also a tremendously beautiful anthology of artwork. There are fifty-seven sets of illustrations that total nearly 300 hundred pieces, the vast majority of which are colored. So, if you fancy yourself a collector of this stuff, then I suggest you get to secure a copy before the print runs out.
Paleobotany: The Study of Plant Fossils
Paleobotany is the academic term for the study of plant fossils. Ancient plants, like ancient animals, sometimes leave traces of their existence imprinted on the rock, trapped in amber, solidified in ice, etc., and the nature of their being is quite different from the nature of their descendants today that there needs to be a separate field of study to investigate them.
Plant fossils are typically impressed on rock surfaces, leaving a sort of engraving that captures their form in a way that lasts beyond the soft tissue. Some plant fossils, which originate from wood specimens, are petrified, although they sometimes preserve some of the original material beneath the new material. Other plant fossils can also calcify into lumps of carbon found within coal deposits, which is why they are called coal balls.
While paleobotany conjures up images of bearded scientists looking at leaf imprints on rocks, the field is much more complex than that. Paleobotany is a highly integrated interdisciplinary area of specialty, especially with today’s modern techniques and discoveries. Case in point: more than half a century ago, a paleobotanist would only have had to study geology and plant biology to properly investigate fossilized plants. But now, with the creation of new fields of science like geochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, etc., paleobotany has become more complex than ever.
What Does Analyzing Plant Fossils Teach Us?
While we may think that paleobotany and its findings are too esoteric and too academic for any of us to ever consider its practical merit, that is a decidedly wrong way to approach key areas of knowledge. That is anti-intellectualism, and just because we don’t think or have no idea how paleobotany’s discoveries can benefit us does not mean that it does not.
Firstly, analyzing plant fossils reveals to us that the diversity of the plant species we see today is just a small fraction of the entire range of diversity that has existed in Earth’s biological history.
This provides us not only a vision of the past and how things became how they are now but also a glimpse of the future and the possibilities of how today’s plant species might evolve in a thousand years’ time.
It is also through paleobotanical study that scientists can decipher a modern plant’s ancestry and its relative species. Through this meticulous reconstruction of a species’ genetic ancestry, scientists can make further and more accurate assumptions about what a given plant is capable of.
The awareness of how certain plant species became extinct is also a purview of paleobotany, and by studying their fossils and learning more about the conditions during their period of existence, scientists can better understand how to prevent similar occurrences from happening in the future and perhaps bio-engineer important plant species to overcome certain conditions and thrive in otherwise inhospitable spaces.
The Damsel’s Files 