United States: Scientists have found a unique fossil that doesn’t match any known species of flowering plants. The fossil, discovered in Rainbow, Utah, in 1969, belongs to a plant called Othniophyton elongatum, or “alien plant.” This discovery helps us learn more about Earth’s ancient plant life. The area where it was found was once a mining town but is now a ghost town.
A new study in the Annals of Botany shows that the analyzed fossil leaves are 47 million years old and belong to a plant with previously unknown type of flowers and fruits.
In the beginning, researchers had to rely only on the outline and the vascular patterning of the leaves in order to guess the species of what a flowering plant was essentially when no flowers, fruits, or branches were present.
As reported by the Independent.co, they felt that it might have had leaves consisting of many small divisions and on this account concluded that the vanished species might have formed part of the ginseng family.
However, in the latest study figuring out more fossils that of the plant puts the fact that left, fruits and flowers attached to the stem of the fossils were not similar to other plants of the ginseng family at all.
This totally changed the visualization of what the plant used to look like, as new fossils had leaves adjoined to stems.
“This fossil is unique in the sense that it has also the twig with fruits and leaves still attached to it. Normally, they are identified as distinct,” said study co-author Steven Manchester of the Florida Museum of Natural History.
“The two twigs we found the kind of leaf attached is the same, but the two mentioned twigs are not compound. They’re simple, and this went off the idea of it being anything in that family,” Dr Manchester said.
In the study, the scientists had to look at the characteristics of the old and new fossils and then look among the more than 400 different living families of flowering plants if they match any of today’s living plant families.
But they could not associate the bizarre medley of traits with any of the fossils. When researchers have looked among the extinct families, they have failed again.
In the course of the study, the scientists bring to light an issue that researches encounter in analyzing ancient plant fossils; and more so, plants that existed approximately 65 million years and younger.