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The other night I was watching National Geographic video on the tropical
rainforest. They said that some trees have this extension on the leaves; drip tips
that help drain the leaves of water. If the water was on the leaves for a long
time it would be departmental for the leaves and trees. These forests have from
100 to 400 inches of rain a year. I don’t know about paleobontany, but are there any Mesozoic leaves with
these drip tips? Liaoning? I don’t think so. It would be interesting to find
out if there are any rainforests in the Mesozoic. This would mean a lot of symbiotic
relationships between plants and insects, plants and vertebrates. Also, if we look at the habitats that are around today, and took an
inventory of the types of animals living there, there bauplan, then we can
extrapolate fossil environments with similar bauplans. The more ‘adavanced’
mammalian bauplan wouldn’t be there, i.e. Primates, but there would be a host
of other kinds of bauplans. Then we can look at a formation, site, see what
kind of bauplan’s are there, then extrapolate what kind of animals ‘should’ be
there, then hopefully find them. Also the level of evolution needs to be added,
i.e. the Paleozoic and up to the late middle Triassic wouldn’t have a ‘bird-like’,
bat-like, animal flying around. A lot of if/then’s, but something to consider. Tracy |