Melissa Barton, Writer

I wrote this month’s University of Colorado Museum of Natural History Object of the Month, Fossil Ginkgo from Siberia. Every month the Museum website highlights a specimen or artifact from its collection of over 4 million items.

I really enjoyed writing this up–the Kudia River fossils are beautiful and strikingly different from the cold-tolerant plants of today’s eastern Siberia. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find much about Kudia River in the scientific literature. I also think ginkgoes in particular are really interesting–today one species survives as the sole representative of an entire order which was once both more diverse and more widespread. Was it primarily climate change that led to the decline of the ginkgoes or did other factors come into play?

It’s a bonus that the Kudia River fossils were collected by one of my scientific heroes, T.D.A. Cockerell.

Looking at fossils from all over the world is way of traveling for me–both through space and time. One of my most profound experiences while traveling recently was seeing petrified redwood stumps in Iceland. While I knew that redwoods once grew all over the world, imagining the redwood forests of California while surrounded by the mossy volcanic highlands of modern Iceland really brought home to me how much the world has changed.

Photo: Wouter Hagens