NORAMBER

We aim to use three-dimensionally preserved plants to understand the Late Cretaceous forests of northern North America. The Late Cretaceous was a time of global ecological upheaval. The rise to dominance of the flowering plants and a changing climate is thought to have changed the composition of forests globally. The mid latitude northern North American forests of the Late Cretaceous were then under pressure from these changes. However, little is known about some of these forests and how they reacted to the changes. We want to understand the plant composition and their community within these forests. We can do this through identifying the preserved plant fossils. This will enable us to provide a detailed botanical background and palaeoecological context. From this new information we can provide a reconstruction of the forests to give a more complete picture of these forests. This then gives a better context for all the other fossil organisms recovered from these forests. We will focus on using two types of exceptional three-dimensional preservation found in the fossil record. Three dimensionally preserved plants can provide more information aiding their identification than the more common two-dimensionally preserved plants. We will use two special modes of three-dimensional preservation for identification: plants found in amber and those that are permineralised. The plant fossils in amber we plan to study come from the Raritan Formation (New Jersey, USA) and the Foremost Formation (Alberta, Canada). The permineralised plants are found from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation in Alberta (Canada), close (geographically and in age) to the Canadian amber we wish to study. This project could also permit us to uncover reasons why amber (fossilised plant resin) can found from some forests and not others, and which plants may have been the amber sources.