Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 23, 1993 TAG: 9312230236
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE LENGTH: Long
At least the geological community. Or, at the very least, paleontologists who are into 230 million-year-old plants.
Scientists have discovered a tiny fossil - a delicate, silvery imprint on the coal-black shale - which they believe is evidence of the oldest flowering plant in the world.
The find counters the widely held notion that flowering plants didn't appear until 130 million years ago.
The little rock from a Pittsylvania County quarry sets that time-frame back 100 million years.
"It's not a pretty fossil. You can't put it up over your mantelpiece," Nicholas C. Fraser, a paleontologist at the museum, said Wednesday.
He handled the shale pieces gingerly, for they could shatter if dropped. Angling the flat surface in the light, one could see a faint leaf pattern, the size of the top third of a finger.
"At the moment, it's worth nothing, on the open market. Scientifically, it's exceedingly valuable," Fraser said.
That claim won't be without its critics, he acknowledged. But two respected scientific journals have published articles about the discovery, and the scientists have received a National Geographic Society grant for more digging.
It was time to tell the world, said Don Sutton, spokesman for the museum.
Turn back to the summer of 1992. Dozens of international geologists met in Front Royal to talk about their favorite subject - fossils.
They took a field trip to a quarry on the Virginia-North Carolina border, where a doctoral student named Paul Olsen had turned up some interesting fossils years ago.
Olsen, now a geology professor at Columbia University, was along for the trip and "was hacking away at the [exposed rock] face, and he split open this piece of rock," Fraser said.
Noting the unusual fossil, Olsen dropped the rock in his shirt pocket to take back to a colleague, Bruce Cornet, who specializes in old plants.
"He gets very excited when he sees it," Fraser recalled. Cornet recognized in the leaf fossil a looped pattern of veins unique to flowering plants.
Realizing the potential significance of the discovery, Cornet spent the next several months trying to debunk his own theory. But he kept coming back to the idea that this was a flowering plant.
Adding weight to the argument are two other fossils of what could be a flowery stalk and a tiny fruit-like organism that were found along with the leaf.
Further, the fossil apparently doesn't fit with anything else dating from that time period.
"He's convinced me," Fraser said, "and I wouldn't be working with him if I wasn't happy with his judgment."
If it's true, the discovery could shed some light on prehistoric mysteries, but it also raises questions. Why, for instance, did the flowering plants wait 100 million to diversify - which Cornet, Fraser and others believe happened 130 million years ago.
Was there something keeping them in check?, Fraser asked.
"You have a chance of understanding evolution, extinction and what was going on in the past without the interference of man."
This particular species probably fell into extinction long ago, Fraser said, and there's no known descendant.
This tiny, controversial plant isn't the only fossilized prize to be dug out of the Virginia quarry.
Fraser, who specializes in vertebrates, has found what he believes are the "first true flies" and all manner of "really weird insects."
He has dubbed the quarry the "Solnhofen of North America" - which is bound to raise eyebrows in geology circles. Solnhofen is the limestone quarry in Bavaria where the most famous fossil, according to Fraser, of the world's oldest bird was found a century ago.
But the Pittsylvania site may deserve the distinction.
The quarry has ideal conditions for preservation, Fraser said.
A lake 130 miles long and 25 miles wide once covered part of Pittsylvania County. No animals could live on the oxygen-poor floor of this deep, calm lake, which meant that organisms filtered down and settled undisturbed into the sediment.
Millions of years later, this area, known as the Late Triassic Cow Branch Formation of the Dan River/Danville basin, is a paleontological gold mine.
The quarry offers "a little glimpse of a whole community," Fraser said. "We have the plants, we have the insects, we have vertebrates - everything that made up that whole ecosystem at that time."
Fraser has found fossils of hundreds of small amphibious reptiles with webbed feet, positioned such that a mass kill from some environmental catastrophe is suspected.
He's also found fragments of a large reptile of unknown character. "We're on the search for this bigger animal."
Dinosaur? Doubtful. Crocodile? Perhaps. The Loch Ness monster? Fraser, a Scot who grew up near the famed lake, shrugged and laughed.
The quarry is in the Cascades community of Pittsylvania County. The state line runs right through it, along the face. Fraser is almost certain, however, that the fossil came from the Virginia side.
The quarry is owned by Virginia Solite Corp., a subsidiary of Solite Corp, headquartered in Richmond. C.H. Gover is plant manager there.
"We could go back in there at any time, but we let the Virginia Museum of Natural History" continue to excavate undisturbed, Gover said.
Solite mines shale and processes it into blocks used in construction in the U.S., he said.
The company owns quarries up and down the East Coast, and in Virginia, works closely with the museum on fossilized finds.
The museum is free to take any fossils it finds, and Gover said the company would likely donate the flowering plant and others.
"We want to educate the people on it," Gover said. "We want the kids to see this. We're trying to be a good neighbor."
With the National Geographic grant of $14,000, and under the auspices of the natural history museum, members of the scientific team will continue to excavate the quarry. They'll be on the lookout for more specimens of the mysterious flowering plant, the rest of that large animal - and who knows what else.
"It really is a key site," Fraser said. "We don't know what else we're going to find there."
by CNB