Global Greening in a Warmer World: What We Can Learn from Plant Fossils

Presented by Dr. Tammo Reichgelt, University of Connecticut, May 2, 2024.
Plant fossils enable paleobotanists to reconstruct ancient landscapes. They provide scientists with information on the ecosystems that ancient animals such as dinosaurs lived in, and the types of plants those animals might have eaten. Over a century of collecting plant fossils from all around the world, paleobotanists have learned that when ancient worlds were warmer, they were also ‘greener.’ For example, the Cretaceous dinosaurs of Alberta would have enjoyed warm and moist productive forests-not the prairies, shrubby badlands, and boreal forests that typify the landscape today. In this talk, Dr. Reichgelt explores what plant fossils reveal about greening in ancient warmer worlds, what the mechanisms are behind this greening, and what parallels exist with present-day global warming.