How Did Duckbill Dinosaurs Get to Morocco? 

I came across THIS ARTICLE and found it intriguing. Duckbilled dinosaurs are a North American family and they live on land. You can't walk from North America to Morocco. They developed long after the break up of Pangea

North American duckbills are large, the earliest Moroccan ones are small, but they got bigger later. (Geology speak here: later means millennia.)

There are duckbills in Europe, the article does not discuss how they got there. But you could not walk from Europe to Africa at that time - the distance was greater then than now. Tethys was much wider than todays Mediterranean.

So how did they get to Morocco? We do not know how, but they did; the author says that it must be by some extraordinary means. Floating, rafting, swimming are discussed in the article and the author goes on to suggest that freak events, although rare, can have major effects.

Amazing to think what finding a bone can can lead to!

Distribution of duckbill dinosaurs in North Africa and Europe. Nick Longrich

 Anthropocene - the Ongoing Story

The Anthropocene Working Group recently decided not to recognise the existence of the Anthropocene - much to the disgust of some members of the group - see HERE.

If the Anthropocene had been recognised it would have marked the end of the Holocene, the current geological epoch, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the Younger Dryas. There has been much discussion about when the putative Anthropocene would be deemed to start. I had a strange wish to straddle two Geological Epochs! 

The wish for the new epoch has a great deal to do with environmental concerns. Perhaps it should be considered an Event rather than Epoch, similar to the Great Oxygenation Event of the Proterozoic, the Snowball Earth Events and the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. 

And as THIS ARTICLE suggests, global warming has been caused by a small number of people rather than humanity as a whole and would be better named Plutocracene!

 Earliest Forest in the World in Devon and Somerset

A correspondent sent me the link to THIS ARTICLE, for which I am very grateful. The article is based on THIS PAPER. The papers concern newly discovered fossil trees found in Middle Devonian sandstones in the Hangman Sandstone Formation which is of Eifelian age (393 - 387 million years).

Not only were fossilised trees found but also forests. The trees are of an extinct species related to ferns and horsetails - the cladoxylopsids, which look rather like palm trees - long stem (2 - 4m) with "leaves" like palm fronds at the top. (Here "leaves" means lots of twiglets.)

There are older trees to be found but this is the oldest forest. And it marks the time when vegetation had a significant impact on sedimentation, changing the way the non-marine surface of the earth looked. 

The Hangman Sandstone Formation

The tree trunks are preserved mostly as impressions. The most abundant forms show a three-dimensional surface, consisting of longitudinal strips of slightly raised smooth matrix alternating with slightly lower relief strips in which short transverse depressions are closely arranged (A - D). (See pages 12 and 13 of the academic paper)

 Down to Earth Extra March 2024

The March 2024 edition of Down to Earth Extra has been published. You can download it HERE or you can read it below.