Smithsonian palynologist Dr. Vera Korasidis completing fieldwork in Wyoming as part of her Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the NMNH.
Smithsonian Magazine has a piece about fossil pollen. Microscopic fossil of pollen millions of years old gives insight into the climate many years ago.
The natural world has always fascinated me, starting with the days of my youth exploring the bushland surrounding my childhood home, collecting flowers and rocks and being curious about their growth and formation. My passion for the outdoors continued to develop through time as did my desire to explore the world and its evolution. As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), I am currently generating data helping us to construct Earth’s dynamic climate history.
As a palynologist, I study microscopic fossil spores and pollen that were produced by plants for reproduction. Pollen is highly important to the future of every plant and is made of an incredibly resilient substance (sporopollenin) ensuring that pollen can be preserved in rocks for hundreds of millions of years.
Fieldwork is required to collect rock samples that contain these tiny fossils. Once returning to the NMNH, rock samples are processed using a variety of chemicals. These chemicals dissolve the rock and isolate the extremely resilient pollen. The pollen is then placed onto glass slides and examined using a high-powered microscope.
Every plant that has ever grown on Earth produces a pollen grain of distinct appearance and under a microscope, it becomes extremely apparent just how diverse pollen grains are. As palynologists, we work together to study and collect pollen from modern trees, carefully examining and documenting their shape and appearance. We can then compare the modern pollen grains to the fossil record. If we observe a pollen grain that resembles a modern pollen grain, even in rocks millions of years old, we can be confident that they were both produced by the same type of plant because plants do not change their pollen types once they have evolved (for example, some pollen types have remained unchanged for over 100 million years).
