Glossopterisft. Aviwe MatiwaneIt’s just a myth: your car doesn’t run on liquid dinos

Glossopterisft. Aviwe MatiwaneIt’s just a myth: your car doesn’t run on liquid dinosaurs. Though it’s true that coal and gas were once living beings, they’re remnants of plants and small animals that died millions of years before the first dinosaurs walked the Earth. This was a time before flowers even existed.“In South Africa, Glossopteris formed our oldest coal fields. This shows the great contribution the fossil plant has in our economy,” says paleobotanist Aviwe Matiwane.Glossopteris is one of the largest and best-known groups of extinct plants. Their fossils are found all over the global south, what we now call South America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. This distribution is one of the many pieces of evidence that those places, though now separated by oceans, were once connected as a supercontinent called Gondwana.These once common plants were majestic trees that could grow as tall as a ten-story building, with hundreds of species scattered all across Gondwana. Today, they’re mostly only known from their simple, tongue-like fossil leaves.Unfortunately, their plain appearance makes it hard for scientists to tell them apart. This is a 200-year-old mystery Avie is trying to solve: figuring out which tiny features of the leaves are most useful for classifying each species.On top of that, she’s also developing a database that will be available online for researchers worldwide. Her research is possibly the first one to look at these iconic plants’ taxonomic details at such a great detail, a proof that shows how understudied plant fossils are.In fact, when Avie competes her PhD, she will be one of three paleobotanists in South Africa.This is why she wants to get people excited about fossil plants. Through twitter and instagram, she wants the world to see what paleobotanists do, whether it’s curating fossils at the museum or going out for fossil digs. In the physical world, she also participates in a lot of outreach programs at the Albany museum where she works in.Though plants might be at the bottom of the food chain, only by understanding how they lived and died we can paint a better picture of life in the ancient past.—Aviwe Matiwane is a PhD student at the Department of Botany at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Get to know Avie, fossil plants, and biostratigraphy.Twitter · Instagram · Albany Museum Instagram ·  Albany Museum Facebook · Writing—My main blog · Ko-fi · Patreon -- source link

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