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Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is now available.

Some of Jack Nisbet's "Boundary" columns are available here, with more on the way.

Boundaries October 2011

NAMING THE ROSES

Illustrations by Emily Nisbet
Modern Indian plum or osoberry Oemlaria cerasiformis
Stonerose fossil of newly described species Oemlaria janhartfordae

Educators all over the country are receiving flyers announcing October 9-15 as National Earth Science Week, leading up to a National Fossil Day on the weekend. Lucky for us, the North Columbia Country’s own Stonerose Interpretive Center in Republic has responded with a wide range of activities that celebrate the rich geologic and biologic past of the Okanogan Highlands (See the schedule in this month's What's Happening or go to www.stonerosefossil.org/ for details).

These events offer an opportunity to probe two of the most common questions asked by students who visit Stonerose and find themselves captivated by the sheer beauty of the fossil images that appear, as if by magic, when they begin splitting stones.

First of all, how do people get involved in the world of fossil leaves? What carries them from the long hours of fieldwork required to find these imprints to the patient laboratory techniques it takes to unlock the deeper secrets of an ancient landscape?

And secondly, how can anyone wrap their mind around the vast expanses of time that these fossils represent? How can the span of one human life, long at 100 years, possibly expand to comprehend the workings of the ancient lake that silted over leaves, feathers, insects, and fishes as they expired around Repubic something like 50 million years ago?

Paleobotanist Kathleen Pigg, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences, offers a window into both answers. She is one of the authors, along with colleagues Melanie DeVore of Georgia College and State University and Karl Volkman of Stonerose, of the popular guidebook to the site, Fossil Plants from Republic: A Guidebook (published in 2011 and available at Stonerose Interpretive Center or through their web site).

Even over the phone, Dr. Pigg’s memory of how she wound her way to Stonerose radiates with enthusiasm. As a girl growing up in Ohio, she spent plenty of time outside, looking at wildflowers in rich eastern hardwood forests. The way her mother taught her the names of what was growing there struck a chord, and led her to the study of plant morphology at Ohio University. She wanted to see how living things grew, and where the shapes of seeds and cones and flowers came from.

As part of her studies Dr. Pigg visited various sites in the Northwest to look at leaf fossils of the Middle Eocene and Miocene periods, time that stretches from more than 50 to less than 20 million years ago. Strangely, the plants that Dr. Pigg saw here reminded her of the flora she had seen growing up in southern Ohio. At some point, she found herself walking through the University of Washington arboretum with an enthusiastic collector named Wes Wehr, who held an informal appointment at the Burke Musuem and was exciting a whole range of people about the wonders of a fossil site in Republic. It was fall, and Dr. Pigg recalls a swirl of “pretty fall leaves”--ginkgo, maple, sycamore, elm, birch, and hazlenut. When Wehr assured her that she could find fossils of every one of those trees at Stonerose, she was on her way.

Wes Wehr and other visiting scientists quickly realized that the fossil plants coming out of Stonerose included a large number of representatives from the rose family. This group includes not only wild roses, but also such familiar Northwest fruits and flowering shrubs as chokecherry, hawthorne, crabapple, raspberry, thimbleberry, serviceberry, oceanspray, ninebark, Indian-plum, mountain ash, and spiraea. It turns out that the Stonerose site offers paleobotanists a startlingly clear look at a period of Eocene time when the rose family was coming into its own, and many of our favorites were beginning to emerge in the forms that we see them in today. This direct connection between fossil and modern leaves offers a chance to place all those layers of time into some kind of perspective.

Dr. Pigg and two other colleagues have recently authored a technical paper that describes two distinct Stonerose fossil flowers. In careful scientific language. accompanied by photographs that compare living three-dimensional flower parts with the flattened shadows of fossil imprints, the authors describe the taxonomic details that led them to their conclusions.

Both of the new plants belong to the rose family. One is related to our modern chokecherry, which everyone knows from their dense cylinders of white flowers that decorate roadsides and meadow edges each spring. The second is very close to osoberry or Indian-plum, a common wild plum that today appears only on the west side of the Cascade Range. According to the rules of the formal scientific world, if you describe a new plant for the first time, you have the honor of naming it, and that is exactly what Dr. Pigg and her colleagues John Benedict and Melanie DeVore do in their paper.

Members of the cherry genus Prunus are distinguished by the presence of two distinct nectar glands where each stem meets its leaf—if you take a look at the Queen Anne cherry tree in your back yard or a chokecherry by the creek, a close inspection will turn up these twin spots. Prunus is a large genus, including species from North America, Europe, and Asia. To distinguish the fossil plant in the paper, the authors gave it the name Prunus cathybrownae, honoring not only Cathering Brown, the current director of the interpretive center, but also her mother and daughter--three generations of Cathy Browns who have contributed to the community of both Republic and Stonerose.

In contrast to all those cherry species, in North American the modern osoberry or Indian-plum stands alone in its own genus of Oemleria. Taxonomically, they are distinguished by the way their five pistils form separately in each flower, and one beautiful Stonerose fossil shows the faint outline of these separate pistils waving from an ancient bloom. The new species has been named Oemleria janhardfordae, after a long-time Stonerose supporter Jan Hartford, who splits her time between the coast and the interior, just like this ancient genus.

Sight is one sure way to connect these two Oemleria species through time, but modern observers get to experience all the qualities of a living plant. The bark of the osoberry, for instance, emits a distinctive smell, like alcohol on a walk down a hospital hallway. The fragile white flowers that dangle in clusters from coastal bushes are among spring’s first blooms there. Each shrub is either male or female, and though their flowers are subtly different in form, anyone with a nose can distinguish the sexes by smell. The males ones are acrid and bitter, like cat urine on an old sleeping bag. Most people find the female blooms much more attractive; they remind me of the watermelon pickles my Aunt Edith used to make.

It’s not surprising that tribal people, who related to these plants for thousands of years, put their qualities to particular uses. Carefully peeled, the bark of both chokecherry and osoberry makes good cordage for tying things together: some families in our area used chokecherry for lashing the framework of their sturgeon-nosed canoes, while certain coastal fisherman favored osoberry bark for securing a stone point to a harpoon.

The little Oemleria plums are as interesting as any cherry. Following the female flowers in small clusters, the fruits change from yellow/orange to deep purple as they ripen. These plums remain very sour until fully ripe, and have large pits that harbor the same bitter, toxic compound that gives almonds and peach pits their distinctive smell, as well as a thin waxy coating that puts some people off. But birds and small mammals go after them with relish, and savvy coastal tribes ate the Indian-plums fresh, dried, and cooked.

As with several other Stonerose specimens from the rose family, these newly-named fossils represent the oldest known floral examples of cherries and osoberries in the world, and show for the first time that both genera were present in the early Eocene period in western North America. That is what makes Stonerose such an important site for Dr. Pigg and her fellow scientists. But what might be even more appealing is the way that these rose family members, because of their modern counterparts, can provide a way for any ordinary person to link sensual details with deep time. They offer at least a whiff of what life might have been like along the edge of a quiet lake in the Okanogan Highlands a very long time ago.

The news species of Prunus and Oemleria are described in Benedict, DeVore, and Pigg in the most recent edition of the International Journal of Plant Science (volume 172 number 7, 2011).
For other Boundaries columns on local fossils, check out
The Amulet, April 2003
Mammoth Time, December 2004
Addy Trilobites, June 2005
The Future of Stone Rose, August 2007
One Molar, Many Bones, January 2009
Stonerose Insects, July 2010

Reprints of Jack Nisbet's "Boundary" columns are available here.

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