FIU Graduate Seminar-Tropical forests: A 300-million-year journey

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RockSinCity
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Modern tropical forests are Earth’s most diverse terrestrial habitats but their early history as well as the concomitant rise to dominance of angiosperm diversity is poorly understood. More than 20,000 siderite concretions from the Mazon Creek area of northern Illinois, United States are housed in the
paleobotanical collections of the Field Museum. A large proportion contain fossil plants of Middle Pennsylvanian age that often have excellent three-dimensional morphology and sometimes anatomical detail. Our analyses show that μCT can provide excellent detail on the three dimensional structure of Mazon Creek plant fossils, with the nature of associated mineralization sometimes enhancing and sometimes obscuring critical information. At this time, northern South America is generally reconstructed as an arid equatorial belt, consistent with inferences from the Crato Formation in northeastern Brazil, where both sedimentology and plant macrofossils indicate arid conditions. However, new paleobotanical
evidence from Colombia and Ecuador suggests much richer mesomorphic vegetation during the Early Cretaceous, consistent with outputs from some paleoclimate models. Current research will help clarify the critical earliest phases of angiosperm evolution in northwestern Gondwana.

Dr. Fabiany Herrera specializes in Mesozoic and Cenozoic plant evolution, with significant work in fossil flora from Colombia and Mongolia. His collaborative work spans international institutions, contributing to discoveries that illuminate the origins of early tropical flora.
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