A graduate student from Berkeley restored the look of a plant that lived 375 million years ago.

If you type in the search engine query "dinosaur", then the results of search results, in pictures, there will be thousands and thousands of pictures with dinosaurs. Here and the artist's imagination, and reconstruction of the appearance of various ancient animals from serious scientists.

But according to ancient plants, the situation is different - in most cases we will see photos of petrified plant remains, their traces in modern sedimentary rocks. One of Berkeley's graduate students, Jeff Benck, decided to try to reconstruct the appearance of a Devonian plant, about 400 million years ago.
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Of course, the color of the plant cannot be restored exactly, but some indirect data and the aspirations of the graduate student himself led to, we hope, the most realistic model of the appearance of the ancient plant. The plant itself in Latin was called Leclercqia scolopendra. In many ways, the graduate student was guided by the appearance of a group of modern lycopods plants, to which Leclercqia scolopendra belongs.

In most cases, the remains of plants that lived in such a distant period are fragmentary. Yes, and they come across not so often, because the plant is not a vertebrate, the plant is mineralized, especially of a small size, extremely rarely. And the work of a graduate student and his team will help paleobotanists restore the appearance of many other ancient plants, the fossilized remains of which are in the collections of many museums.



Unfortunately, there are not so many technical details on the Berkeley website, the main data are in a postgraduate article that you can take here .

Via berkeley