HOW DO YOU STUDY A PLANT FOSSIL?
Working with plant fossils is an extremely rewarding job! The most interesting thing is to do fieldwork and to collect the fossils. In the field, the fossils are numbered and carefully packed. Once the fossils arrive at the museum, they are catalogued and sometimes cleaned. Then we “describe” the fossils (measure them, assess their shape, note if they have veins) and analyze them. They are compared with modern plants and other fossils that are similar. This way we can figure out their plant ancestors and if there are any modern, related plants that will help us understand their past distribution. When possible, we reconstruct the environment (habitat and climate) in which they lived with the help of geologists and sedimentologists.
WHEN—THAT IS, FROM WHAT TIME IN THE PAST—DO YOU FIND FLOWERING PLANT FOSSILS?
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To figure out if we can die of boredom, we first have to understand what boredom is. For help, we called James Danckert, a psychologist who studies boredom at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
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ELODIE FREYMANN
When you’re feeling sick, it probably doesn’t occur to you to try eating tree bark.
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THE LEFT OVERS
A lot has happened for modern humans to get to this point. We lost most of our hair, learned how to make tools, established civilizations, sent a person to the Moon, and invented artificial intelligence. Whew! With all of these changes, our bodies have changed, too. It’s only taken us about six million years.
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