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Where do the shrubland, woodland, savanna, chaparral floras exist today?
Less than 1% of n. america north of mexico, the mediterranean, africa, and australia
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What are some of the important plants in the Creede flora that show evidence of chaparral vegetation? How does this flora compare with the older Bridge Creek flora?
Barberry, Ribes, Mahonia, Cercocarpus.
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What is Metasequoia, where does it grow today, and where are fossils of it found?
Metasequoia is a name originally posed for fossils from japan that had the same features of those as the modern plant. fossils are found in California as well as japan
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What is significant about the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument?
Previously thought to be early Oligocene, now considered late Eocene Large lake deposit –over 1271 species of insects, 3 of fish, 8 of molluscs, 3 of birds and at least 114 plant species
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Who are the Leopolds and how have they been important in North America? What are some of the major plants at Florissant? Which of them are extinct taxa?
- The Leopolds saved the Florissant from being built upon with houses. HUGE environmental activists and most went on to continue saving environments.
- some of the major plants include rosaceae, walnuts, cottonwoods, maples, elms, cattails and duckweed. some extinct taxa include fagopsis, florissantia, and fossil seqouia stumps
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What plants occur in Oligocene Catahoula flora of Huntsville, Texas? How is this flora similar to the older middle Eocene Claiborne flora?
legumes, modern and transition oaks, and sabal palms occured during the Oligocene. This is similar to the older flora in that areas of TN and KY contain palms, legumes, and Fagaceae (also frilly fruit)
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What was the temperature like in the Eocene in relation to the rest of the Tertiary?
The Eocene was much cooler in relation to the rest of the Tertiary.
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Describe the plants in the Claiborne Formation and what types of information is known. What kinds of plants do you find in the Chuckanut flora of western Washington? How do they differ from those at Republic, and in the other Okanogan Highlands floras?
- Claiborne formation:
- megafloral assemblages
- lauraceous leaves
- early legumes
- early oak/chestnut groups
- early grasses
- old world palms
- extinct southern dry flora
- In the Chuckanut flora of western WA you find large palm fronds, and many ferns. These are different from those at Republic and Okanogan Highlands in that the latter shows major temperate families like rosaceae.
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What is significant about the preservation of plants in the Princeton Chert and Clarno Nut beds? What kinds of information can we get from this type of preservation compared to other types?
Both of these places show different layers of the fossil, allowing us to see fractured surfaced showing us external morphology as well as internal anatomical structure of fruits and seeds.
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What different types of fruits characterize different subfamilies of the Rosaceae? What kinds of information have we been able to get out of the fossil Prunus (cherry) flowers from Republic?
apple, blackberry, cherry, plum, peach
Prunus has been able to show us a stigma, style, asymmetric ovary, 5 sepals, and a hypanthium
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How do Republic fossils help us understand paleobiogeography of plants with Asian affinities?
European fossil record is mostly seeds, but the plants are actually living in Asia today?
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What are some of the possible causes of the PE thermal maximum and how did it drive the change in global climate?
- - volcanic release of carbon from degassing
- - carbon 12 rich comet struck the earth initiating the warming event
- - huge amounts of peat combusting
- - methane release
- - ocean circulation
- - orbital forcing
- Any of these could drive the change in global climate by increasing the global temperature, causing sea levels to rise
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What is meant by "archaic" and "modern" mammals? When did the change-over happen? What are some
examples from the fossil record of this change?
- paleocene mammals are still on a primitive level of anatomy in comparison to mammals today. Often they show only the first beginning ofspecializations that characterize their descendants from later epochs, such as optimization ofthe teeth for a special kind of food or adaptations of the limbs to fast running. The Paleocenemammalian fauna is therefore often called archaic..
- The change over happened about 65 mya when the dinos went extinct. Some examples include 3 different waves of mammal migration.
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