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Editor's note: This article is part of a series reviewing Utah and national history for KSL.com's Historic section.HANKSVILLE, Wayne County — Dr. Michael D’emic visited Utah in 2014 on a dinosaur dig. The assistant professor at Adelphi University ended up finding something much more important: He discovered the oldest giant flowering tree in North America, which used to stand twice as tall as Utah’s current tallest tree, according to National Geographic.
The record-breaking petrified log ended up being a form of angiosperm wood, according to D’emic, which is a rare find for its time period.
“One of the Bureau of Land Management employees of the Hanksville office invited me to kind of take a little tour and see a few different geological sites and areas around Hanksville and the Henry Mountains,” D’emic told KSL.com. “He brought me to see the tree on that afternoon tour, and I thought it was a really impressive specimen.”
D’emic said he asked to take a few samples so his collaborator Dr. Nathan Jud could identify the specimen. Jud is a professor of plant biology at William Jewell College and was shocked when he realized the petrified log came from a flowering tree.
“When (D’emic) was out there looking around, he came across a large log, even though they were looking for bones and footprints, and (he) knew that I was interested in fossil wood because I’m interested in the evolution of Earth’s forests," Jud said. "So he took a piece off and sent it to me at the University of Florida, where I was a postdoc at the time.”
Jud said that he was shocked when he looked at the anatomy of the specimen. He sent D’emic a congratulatory note for finding something very uncommon.
D’emic and Jud ended up conducting a study on the specimen. D’emic said that the ash layers, sea level rise and fall, and previously discovered fossils are all evidence that points to the tree being over 90 million years old.
“(The tree) is Turonian, which is a geologic age that goes back to about 92 million years ago,” Jud said. “We’ve had flowering plants on Earth for the last 130 million years or so, but there’s this big chunk of 20 (million) or 30 million years where flowering plants are rather rare in fossil record. This is the first time we’ve actually found evidence of angiosperm trees at this time.”
A National Geographic article also emphasizes how rare this find was.
“Finding fossils from this time period, called the Turonian, has been a challenge because sea levels ran high at the time, which means that most Turonian sediments capture what was happening in the water, not on land,” according to the National Geographic.
Less than a hundred specimens of petrified wood this age have been found, National Geographic reports. And when they are found, the specimens are very small, usually only a few inches. The specimen found by D’emic was reportedly 6 feet wide and 36 feet long.
The specimen has set off a whole new wing of research that Jud and D’emic want to complete.
“We sort of opened up this new chest of possibilities in the Ferron Sandstone and we are leading with a really fantastic discovery,” Jud said.
