Scientists Find a Fossilized Ancestor of ‘Dinosaur Food’

This ancient plant might be even more ancient than paleobotanists once believed.

Before the first mammals, before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a plant grew in Gondwana, a huge continent in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost 280 million years later, in what is now Brazil, scientists have identified the fossil remains of that plant as an early member of a lineage called cycads, or cycadales, that continues to this day. The discovery expands scientific understanding of the resilience of these plants, which persisted through two mass extinctions. “The vegetative anatomy of this plant is remarkably similar to the ones that live today,” said Rafael Spiekermann, a graduate student at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Germany and the lead author of a paper describing the fossil in the journal Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology.