A "strange" prehistoric plant species is the lone representative of a mysterious group of organisms that no longer exists, scientists have discovered.
The first evidence of the species—in the form of fossilized leaves—came to light in eastern Utah in 1969. At the time, researchers believed that the plant belonged to the ginseng family, known scientifically as Araliaceae.
But a recent assessment of a 47-million-year-old fossil collected from the same area of Utah, which appears to represent the same species, has demonstrated that it does not coincide with any surviving plant family, including Araliaceae.
A paper describing the research into the prehistoric species—known as Othniophyton elongatum, which translates to "alien plant"—has been published in the journal Annals of Botany.
"This example indicates that the vegetation of circa 47 million years ago included some taxa that cannot readily be placed in modern families and genera," the authors wrote in the study.
One of the study authors is Steven Manchester, curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History, who has been studying 47-million-year-old fossils from Utah for the past few years.
During a visit to the University of California, Berkeley, paleobotany collection, he came across an unidentified and unusually well-preserved plant fossil originally recovered from a location near the ghost town of Rainbow, eastern Utah, within the Green River geological formation—the same location where the 1969 discovery was made.
Close observation revealed that the fossil in the Berkeley collection and the 1969 find belonged to the same plant species. Unusually, the recently identified fossil preserves the flowers, fruits and twigs of the plant, as well as the leaves.
"This fossil is rare in having the twig with attached fruits and leaves. Usually those are found separately," Manchester said in a press release.
This stands in contrast to the 1969 fossil, which preserves just the leaves, limiting what information could be gleaned about the plant.
In the latest study, the researchers found that the Berkeley fossil has a distinctive combination of features, including unusual flowers and fruit, that do not match with other plants in the ginseng family, to which the species was originally assigned following the 1969 discovery.
The authors then conducted a methodical analysis to find any living or extinct plant family that the species might belong to, but they were not able to find any matches.
The diversity within plant families can be remarkable. For example, diverse species such as poison ivy, cashews and mangoes all belong to the same extensive family. The extent of lost diversity within the mysterious extinct group that Othniophyton elongatum belongs to remains unknown.
Reference
Manchester, S. R., Judd, W. S., & Correa-Narvaez, J. E. (2024). Vegetative and reproductive morphology of Othniophyton elongatum (MacGinitie) gen. et comb. nov., an extinct angiosperm of possible caryophyllalean affinity from the Eocene of Colorado and Utah, USA. Annals of Botany. https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcae196
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