Paleontologists from Utah State Parks and the University of Bonn, Germany, are working at a site in northeastern Utah that indicates that a humid forest was present there during the Late Jurassic period. A press release from Utah State Parks shares that the site yielded an abundance of wood from a layer of silty rock several feet thick. In the middle of this was a layer with abundant leaf fossils showing what plants were growing in the woods both as trees and undergrowth. The fossil plants were dug up from the shores of a lake located several miles west of Dinosaur National Monument and occur in the 150-million-year-old Morrison Formation. “We hadn’t found too many specimens yet when the first leaf cuticle emerged, and that caught us pleasantly off guard,”shares Field House Curator John Foster. “We had to scramble to wrap the fossil leaves up before the cuticle dried out and blew away.” The leaves are well preserved enough that the waxy cuticle is intact on many of them. The cuticles from the site are just now beginning to be studied and will yield information on the biological relationships of the ancient leaves.
