The September 2023 General Meeting will be held on Friday, September 8th, 2023 at 8:00 PM via Zoom. Our speaker is Fabiany Herrera, who is the Assistant Curator of Paleobotany at the Field Museum. Mazon Monday #178 was about a recent paper by Fabiany.
Approximately eighty plant taxa have been recognized from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte, but few have been studied in detail, and in some cases the systematic affinities of these fossils need reevaluation. The three-dimensional (3D) preservation of Mazon Creek fossil plants makes them ideal candidates for study using x-ray micro-computed tomography (CT). The new research by Dr. Herrera and colleagues show that CT can provide excellent detail on the three-dimensional structure of Mazon Creek plant fossils. Dr. Herrera will also talk about The Early Cretaceous (~145–100 Ma) and early Cenozoic floras from northern South America and will show how the impact of the end-Cretaceous extinction shaped the evolutionary history of the tropical rainforests.
