Re: Fossil Site

From: schlauer@chemie.uni-wuerzburg.de
Date: Thu May 18 2000 - 11:13:07 PDT


Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 18:13:07 +0000
From: schlauer@chemie.uni-wuerzburg.de
To: cp@opus.hpl.hp.com
Message-Id: <aabcdefg1581$foo@default>
Subject: Re: Fossil Site

Dear Peter & al.,

TNX for the info!

Dr. Crepet & coll. are studying the Turonian (Late Cretaceous)
flowers of Sayreville since a considerable period of time already,
and they have produced a long series of publications on exactly this
topic (incl. descriptions of the mentioned 200 species, usually at
a rate of one species/paper). The NY Times did therefore not report
on a particular, recent discovery. Many interesting data on old
angiosperms have been unearthed during these studies already, but
nothing with a concrete connection to cps has turned up yet. The
"ancient relatives of ... pitcher plants" are apparently fossil
flowers with some similarity to those of _Sarracenia_. Details are
not given, and nothing was (AFAIK) published in the scientific
literature on these particular fossils. So we still have to wait for
the "beef".

It is well possible that the phylogenetic roots of Sarraceniales s.
lat. (incl. Roridulaceae) reach "down" to the Turonian, as other
Ericids have been found in the same stratum. But there is a slight
problem with fossils if they are not obvious "links" between two
lineages: If you find a fossil flower that can be identified as
_Sarracenia_ without doubt, you only learn that _Sarracenia_ did
already exist at a given early date, without learning anything about
its relatives (which you would have to find in even older strata).
If, on the other hand, you find a flower that in fact represents an
old, distant relative of _Sarracenia_, you might not be able to
identify it correctly (cf. the great morphological differences among
the flowers of recent genera of Sarraceniaceae or even the difference
between this family and Roridulaceae!).

Anyway, I have not known about any fossil Sarraceniaceae yet, and all
additional information would be most welcome. BTW: Carnations (also
mentioned in the NYT article) are not native in N America nowadays,
and it would be interesting if the researchers really discovered the
genus _Dianthus_ or only a related one (e.g. _Silene_), which would
of course meet the description "ancient relative".

Kind regards
Jan



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