Fossilized Dinosaur Food

Fossil remains of a plant that seems to be an early example of cycads (or cycadales) has been discovered by scientists. The fossil came from the southern part of a rock layer known as the Irati Formation. Researchers named the preserved species Iratinia australis. While the discovered pieces were small, they were enough to prove the similarities between the remains and the current surviving cycads. Oh, and did you know that this particular fossil served as dinosaur food? The New York Times has more details:

The surviving cycadales are often called “living fossils,” much like present-day coelacanth fish, which retain many of the same characteristics as ancestral fish from hundreds of millions of years ago.

This lineage endured a pair of cataclysms when most life was killed off the planet. The first occurred at the end of the Permian geological period 250 million years ago and is often called the Great Dying. It was the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, opening the evolutionary door to the rise of dinosaurs. The other was the extinction 66 million years ago that brought the age of dinosaurs to an end.

“It’s a really long history on Earth,” said André Jasper, a biology professor at the University of Taquari Valley in Brazil and an author of the paper. “You can find it, this kind of plant, in Australia, in Asia, in Africa, in America. It spread all over the world.”

Cycadales never dominated the plant kingdom, although they have thrived in certain places. Their heyday was more than 120 million years ago before they, and even older plants like conifer trees, were overtaken by the advent of flowering plants, which were quicker to reproduce and adapt to changing ecological niches.

“These guys were dinosaur food,” said Dennis Stevenson, an emeritus senior curator at the New York Botanical Garden and an expert on cycadales who was not involved with the research.