This Mysterious Plant Fossil Found Near A Utah Ghost Town Was Lost To Time, And It’s Considered To Be An Alien
In 1969, the fossilized leaves of a species called Othniophyton elongatum, which translates to “alien plant,” were identified in eastern Utah.
At first, scientists thought the extinct species might belong to the ginseng family. But now, new fossil specimens are making them rethink the theory.
During a visit to the University of California, Berkeley, Steven Manchester, a curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History, was checking out the paleobotany collection when he stumbled upon an unidentified, well-preserved plant fossil. It was unearthed from the same area as the Othniophyton elongatum leaves.
He believed that the leaves actually belonged to a unique plant with distinct fruit and flowers. The 1969 fossils and those later studied by Manchester came from the same species of plant.
But the leaves, flowers, and fruit of the Berkeley fossils were completely different from other plants in the ginseng family.
“This fossil is rare in having the twig with attached fruits and leaves. Usually, those are found separately,” said Manchester.
He and his colleagues examined the characteristics of old and new fossils, searching for a living plant family to which they could belong. Today, there are more than 400 families of flowering plants.
However, the researchers were unable to match the fossils’ features with any of them. So, the research team then looked at extinct families but ran into a dead end once again.
The fossils were found in the Green River Formation near the ghost town of Rainbow, located in eastern Utah. Around 47 million years ago, the area was tectonically active with a vast inland lake system, creating ideal conditions for preserving fossils.
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Volcanic ash and lake sediments with low levels of oxygen slowed down the decay of many reptiles, fish, birds, invertebrates, and plants. Many were preserved in intricate detail.
The researchers who studied the original leaf fossils of the mysterious species did not have much to work with. They could only analyze the shape and vein patterns of the leaves, which led them to think it might have been a single leaf made up of a bunch of smaller leaflets.
This is a defining feature of multiple plants in the ginseng family. But the new fossils had leaves that were directly connected to stems.
“The two twigs we found show the same kind of leaf attached, but they’re not compound. They’re simple, which eliminates the possibility of it being anything in that family,” said Manchester.
The berries of the fossils eliminated families like the grasses and magnolias and some other modern plant groups.
The team was stumped, but they did not give up. When a new microscopy workstation was set up at the Florida Museum, the team used a powerful digital microscope to view the fossils.
They noticed tiny impressions of their internal anatomy and details of the small, developing seeds. When they compared the traits to extinct families again, there was still no match.
So, they concluded that the plant fossils belong to a plant family that has been lost to time and was never identified.
The study was published in the Annals of Botany.
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