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Show Scientist Probes Flowering Plant Revolution by Tlmma. lUmry Smiltiwmun Newt Service flowering plants. Yet their origins are still nut clearly The ancient leaf fell understood. Charles Darfrom a shrub along the win, the great evolutionist, shoreline 110 to 120 mil- called their emergence "an lion year ago. tank into alioniiiiahle mystery." the muil, slowly dried and HICKEY, a paleobiolo-gis- t with the passage of time at the National Muleft its imprint in the rock seum of Natural History, is at a fiwtil. probing this mystery. He Deeply buried, it prob- does not have to go far to ably would never have find the clues for his study. come to light had it not The Smithsonian museums leen found at a coin! ruc- on the National Mall in tion tile near Baltimore, Washington, D.C., are limit Md., by the Smithtonian virtually on top of the Institution! Dr. laro Hick- worlds most accessible fosey. THE tmall leaf, oddly thaped with disorganized vein patterns, came from a new group of teed plants that appeared on land about 130 million years ago. In doing o, they profoundly altered the course of life on Earth. "The development of flowering plants created a re- volution that opened up vast new resource! of fund and ways of life for animals." Hickey says' "The ascendancy of the flowering plants may have paved the way for the replacement of the dinosaurs by mammals 50 million vears later." Today, almost all the plants we see and eat are mood, Va. SO, WHILE colleagues pack gear fur fossil- - hunting expeditions to remote and exotic areas of the world, Hickey throws his pick and shovel into his car and drives out into Maryland or Virginia to a fossil locale like Dutch Cap, Va. Dutch Gap is a marvelous place to collect, llickey says. The Union Army cut a canal there during the Civil War to reach Richmond and exposed a rich bed of fossil sil deNit of these earliest plants. The heat and the flowering plants - the Po- Confederate snipers probtomac Formation. ably kept the Union solOne hundred and thirty diers from realizing they million years ago, the had stumbled on a treasure Earths land masses were chest of fussil plants. Fniits and flowers of the combined into two supercontinents separated by a earliest flowering plants seaway along the equator. are seldom found, Hickey The earliest known flower- explains. "Most of what we ing plants grew on either know about them comes side of this seaway, gra- from their leaf imprints in dually spreading from the mud or sand in which there. they were buried and from The Potomac Formation their pollen." Only the soft was deposited on the coast tissue of the leaves left fusan imprint of of one of the northern con- sil records tinents as the Atlantic the complex carbon opened up. It forms WHEN the mild or sand, an outcrop a rock formation exposed at the surface under pressure, hardened of the ground in a into rock, the imprints of licit from the leaf and dark film of Wilmington, Del., to Rich- - carlion remained as a permanent fossil record. It is for these fossils that Hickey searches as he chops rock out of the Potomac Formation outcrop. Back at the Museum, - coin-potuid- s. CX-ea- - H&R: BLOCK AXITEST, Oiixblixl kn Montgomery Wank And succeed he did. Hickey has developed a classification system that, for the first time, makes it possible to decipher the history and development of are deductible. False For older persons on a fixed income, H&R Block has the right answer to this and other questions regarding special tax credits and deductions for those taxpayers. If you itemize, the answer is TWE. Because these payments are simply withheld from benefit checks during the year, they arc often overlooked at tax time. MAKE THE TAX LAWS WORK FOR YOU Eagle lodge Balrmaiis IVwess No. 2 I Vwess No. I SAW Trailer AruetHHla Mill Kamils Benelil Verna (lull t 48 !' 3 Machine hid hi senes Craig llaiiimeistrom Ike Teagarden UA$ OViy dtADlNQ OVER TU T THE INCOME TAX PEOPLE KOMntis ( sn 882-401- ii wroi.Tiif.n 1 mi no! ucassMi MMT leaves with modern ones and guessed alxnit the identities of the leaves. "Paleontologists in the 19th century tried to identify plants from their leaves, but they did a poor job, making wildly incor- NJ MAJOR APPLIANCE SERVICE IN TOOELE ON THURSDAYS ' J I, and Oul Of Warranty on Most Manufacturers REFRIGERATORS 2 10 2 10 WASHERS Vit .Z5s .Hi' MVSHOC LAOS plants. The system is Itased on his discovery that each species has a slightly different vein pattern a sort of - fingerprint of the leaf's flowering plants can be seen in a new exhibit hall in the Museum of Natural History, "The Conquest of Land," which traces the emergence and spread of land plants and animals. SPECIMENS of many of the earliest Potomac Formation plants in the lineage developed by Hickey are on view. Also displayed are fossils from the Dakota Formation, which extends from Montana to Colorado to Minnesota and Kansas and contains a rich assortment of plant remains. that reinforced the leaf against the stresses of wind and rain and protected it from tearing. FOSSIL leaves found from this period by Hickey c o o po o c c c c c c c c c c USED CAR SPECIALS' peas, grapes and maples. These stronger, larger and more complex leaves were among the advances which allowed flowering plants to grow to the size of large trees and to displace the more primitive gymnosperm vegetation that had dominated the Earth for almost 200 million years. 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What his system reveals almut the earliest history of including roses, 1980s CLOSEOUT 1 364-776- Lids After Inventory Al & of modem flowering plants, PRICED AT DEALER INVOICE NEW-198- FREEZERS MICRO WAVE OVENS 1133 Richards St, Salt lakt City, Ut. 84101 378 tills NO MILEAGE CHARGE REASONABLE RATES In flowering are better preserved because they were stronger rect identifications, he and better able to withstand the stresses of decay says. The resulting retarded the and transport before study of flowering plant evolution for 80 years. New and more complex DESPITE these earlier leaf shapes are also evolvfailures, Hickey believed ing, including heart- - and that a systematic approach umbrealla- - shaped leaves with the stem point of attachment located well within the leaf margin and compound leaves with leaflets on each side of a central axis. The latter gave rise to a very diverse group NOW IS THE TIME TO DUY! ALL ... ..... ini i 48 I Tuikevs Tom I 4 Keik Place Ccuot to (iail Moos lodge Mott A Jells i; jk 37 44 74 , OdarCrrst Crrra ' 75 75 37 . J 75 08 t Service-Term- s - 54 So. Main Store 'Hint .Srrvitx Built 4 5 fogies Lklge 10 2 IimI hi game 93 Keith jolimon 7 3 7 3 73 Aim-uml- fossili-zatio- H&R BLOCK 453 North Main .... Tigris fussil leaves. 2 I fine detail better than the of modem plants. All of the fossil imprint itself. When earliest plants had irregular a characHickey began analyzing vein patterns thousands of Potomac For- teristic that Hickey bemation fossil leaves in the lieves reflects a less sophisSmithsonians collection, ticated growth mechanism. there was no accurate sysBy about 100 million tem to tell one early leaf yean ago, the leaves found from another," he says. in the Potomac Formation People just made superfi- had developed more regucial comparisons of ancient lar vein patterns, in advance Social Security benefits WEU ML Tram Team hi sent Ohm ks Izmk kev . auk Montgomers Some became extinct Hickey photographs the leaf imprint under a mi- while others survived by croscope. High- - contrast evolving into new forms photographs often show that were the forerunners Medicare B payments made by persons receiving True Tooele Traiivcri)t, Thurs., January 15, l'JSl Men league to fossil leaves could succeed. One of the things that encouraged me, he says, "was that drug companies had developed methods to recognize certain species of contemporary plants from the vein patterns of small leaf fragments. It seemed to me that, if the drug companies could do it with modern leaves, I could do it with the earliest Nile M outlay |