A B.C. paleobotanist has rediscovered a treasure trove of plant fossils, long stored at Simon Fraser University, and analyzed them to uncover new information about the region’s ancient climate.
Rolf Mathewes was an undergraduate student at SFU when his supervisor at the time found plant fossils from a deposit exposed during the school’s construction on Burnaby Mountain in the late 1960s.
When Mathewes returned to teach at SFU as a professor of paleoecology and palynology, he pulled them out of the cabinets to learn more about what Burnaby Mountain flora looked like 40 million years ago, in the midst of a global cooling trend.
“These plant fossils tell us the climate was warm temperate to subtropical because of the presence of palms,” Mathewes said in a Wednesday news release from SFU.
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“If you wanted an analogue for what the climate was like compared to today, the conditions would be similar to the East Coast of the United States somewhere around Wilmington, North Carolina, where palms are still native today.”
The research co-authored by David Greenwood of Brandon University and Tammo Reichgelt of the University of Connecticut was published in this month’s edition of the International Journal of Plant Sciences. The team conducted a microscopic analysis of fossil pollen extracted from the shale findings, and also found evidence of alders, ferns, elms, sweetgum, and more.
“The fossil flora contained a mix of subtropical and temperate forest elements, including rare palm and possible cycad leaf fragments, rare conifer pollen, and a diversity of broad-leaved trees,” the study found.
Other notable findings from the set of late Eocene-era fossils include a hydrangea flower and the flower of an extinct plant from the same family as the Eastern North American basswood tree.
Prior to the team’s analysis, the paper states, Burnaby Mountain flora from the Huntingdon Formation had not previously been studied.
Forty million years ago Burnaby Mountain had not yet formed, and was a floodplain with ponds and river channels, Matthews said.