Aptian Cretaceous North American Flowering Plant Found in Smithsonian Collection

A fossil in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution could represent the oldest flowering plant ever found in North America, researchers say.

University of Maryland doctoral student Nathan Jud said was looking at a batch of ancient plant fossils in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum's collections when a particular fossil caught his eye, Smithsonian.com reported Friday.

"It looked sort of like a little piece of fern, so I tried to remove a bit of the rock that was covering it to get a sense of what type of fern it was," he said. "But the more of the rock I would lift off the surface, the more fossil I found buried. What I thought had been one little piece of a leaf actually turned out to be two, connected to each other."

"Eventually, I realized this wasn't a fern at all, but some kind of early flowering plant," he said.

Reporting his work in the American Journal of Botany, Jud said the fossil, at somewhere between 125 and 115 million years old, is among the oldest flowering plants ever found in North America.

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