Sorry this took longer than expected.
My Internet connection decided to stop working last night (while I was in the middle typing GOF posts, no less
).
And another thing, do you know anything about prehistoric plants? I want to write a scene where one of the characters is using medicine from the plants. I know it's LBT, but I want to be as accurate as I possibly can when it comes to the plants of that day.
Just earlier on the day you asked that question, my younger brother and I were looking at a book on trees, and I had told him that I wished I knew more about Mesozoic plants.
Granted, I probably know more than the layperson, but that’s not enough for me.
From what I know,
The Land Before Tme isn’t that scientifically accurate in its portrayal of Mesozoic flora, and considering that it depicts dinosaurs from all stages of the Mesozoic living side-by-side, you probably don’t need to worry too much about the plants being from a particular period. That said, from what I researched, it seems that the dominant plants during the Triassic and Jurassic periods were ferns, tree ferns, cycads, cycadeoids, ginkgoes, and conifers. Flowering plants became common in the Cretaceous period.
ï Cycads and cycadeoids (Cycadophyta): Primitive, woody-stemmed plants with tough, palm-like leaves. Some have spherical stems (almost like giant, unopened pinecones), others treelike. Cycadeoids (order Bennettitales) are extinct today.
ï Ferns and tree ferns (Pteridophyta): Tree ferns (order Cyatheales) have their fronds on the top of tree trunk-like stalks, as much as 50 feet (15 meters) tall in some species.
ï Horsetails (Equisetaceae): Ancient relatives of ferns, which may consist of a thin stem with whorls of hairlike branches (hence the common name) or a thicker, unbranched, segmented stalk. More information (and perhaps the world’s first poem about them)
here.
ï Ginkgoes (Ginkgoaceae): The only ginkgo species alive today,
Ginkgo biloba, is very similar to its ancestors in the Mesozoic. It is a large tree that is dioecious (having either male or female reproductive structures, as opposed to both, like most plants), with fan-shaped leaves that turn yellow in the fall, and fleshy, light yellow-brown, fruit-like seeds that, when ripe, supposedly smell like butter that has long passed its expiration date.
ï Conifers: Cone-bearing trees such as redwoods, cypresses, and Araucariaceae. The latter is represented today by three genera:
Wollemia (the so-called Wollemi pine),
Agathis (New Zealand’s kauri or dammar tree) and
Araucaria (the fantastically named monkey-puzzle tree
), all of which had extremely similar ancestors during the Mesozoic.
ï Angiosperms (Magnoliophyta): The flowering plants. These have been around since at least the early Cretaceous (~140 million years ago), and comprise most of the familiar plants alive today. Mesozoic examples included the ancestors of modern magnolias, palms, oaks, maples, sycamores, figs, roses, buttercups, and water lilies.
Until recently, it was thought that grasses (Poaceae) did not evolve until long after the Mesozoic. However, sauropod coprolites (fossilized droppings) from India have been found to contain fragments of silica resembling those found in grass stems. This suggests that the ancestors of modern rice and bamboo existed in the late Cretaceous (65 million years ago). From what I have gathered, though, there is no evidence that there were fields of grass like those we are so familiar with today during the time of the dinosaurs, though there was probably some other plant that filled the niche.
As far as I know, however, there is as yet no fossil evidence of a tree species with palmately lobed peltate leaves resembling five-pointed stars.
Here are some links that might help as well:
http://fossilnews.com/2000/mezplants/mezplants.htmlhttp://www.projectexploration.org/garden/index.htmhttp://www3.hi.is/~oi/Nemendaritgerdir/Aud...Paleobotany.pdf (This one’s a PDF file, and rather scientific, so you might have trouble with it.)
How old were you when you became interested in dinosaurs? Is there anything that triggered your interest in them?
Rat_lady7 asked that question way back when;
here is my answer. I don't remember how my interest in dinosaurs got started, and as I discuss in that post, LBT may or may not have been a part of it.
How is the Sasquatch?
Sasquatch is doing well. Unfortunately, he's become very bold in his outdoor excursions, and has begun bringing home voles and shrews he has caught. Usually they are already dead; on at least one occasion a vole was alive but crippled, and we had to put it out of its misery, the poor thing
; and sometimes the animals are uninjured enough to run away once we get Sasquatch to let them go (This has happened a few times with voles, and once with a chipmunk). We've tried to limit the amount of time Sasquatch spends outside, and the distance he travels from the house, but he's become a master of slipping out the door as soon as we open it. Today I tried putting a collar with a bell on him so that his ability to approach prey unheard is reduced, but he clearly hated it and struggled to get it off. Apparently he succeeded, because when someone let him back into the house, the collar was gone (It was designed to break away if it got hooked on a branch or other object; Sasquatch must have managed to unsnap it somehow). I'm just glad we don't live in New Zealand or any other place with rare, vulnerable wildlife.
