Re: Hell Creek flora help request

[Danvarner@aol.com]

Dear Larry, Probably nothing could be of more help to you than the
illustration on Pg.80-81 in _Prehistoric Journey_by Kirk Johnson and Richard
Stucky, published by the Denver Museum of Nastural History. Johnson has
collected thousands of leaf specimens from the channel sandstones in the Hell
Creek Formation. The leaves in this exhibit are all patterned on actual
specimens.
     About two weeks ago, I went to a lecture by Yale's great paleobotantist,
Leo Hickey, at Rutgers, on the origin of flowering plants. It was riveting, to
say the least. He showed a slide of a painted restoration of a late Cretaceous
stream environment with a conifer forest in the distance with a prominent
dinosaur browse-line. It was superb. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to talk to
him after the lecture. Anyone out there familiar with this painting and its
location? The main point of his talk was that the early angiosperms were
confined to disturbed stream-side environments, were weedy in aspect, and did
not make their move into other environments until the very end of the
Mesozoic, in fact not displacing the conifer regime until after the K/T. He
also torpedoed the coevolution of ornithischian low browsers with angiosperms.
Great talk. Dan Varner.