Bringing Extinct Species Back to Life—UC Berkeley Graduate Species Gives Plant Another Chance to Climb

With so many fossils discovered in the paleontology community, much of what we know about the long-extinct species is based on educated guesses. Structures of bones, orientation, and even width can tell us physiology and function of some long lost species we've never seen. But when it comes to the task of envisioning what the species looked like, the end result is usually a hybrid of the scientists' working understanding of the fossilized remnants and the artist's creative interpretation. But what if the scientist is the creative creating the illustration?

Taking a simple fossil of what appeared to be a centipede, one UC Berkeley graduate student brought a 375 million-year-old plant species back to life-or at least that's what it looks like.

"Typically, when you see pictures of early land plants, they're not that sexy; there is a green forking stick and that's about it. We don't have many thorough reconstructions" the graduate student in the Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, Jeff Benca said. "I wanted to give an impression of what they may have really looked like. There are great color reconstructions of dinosaurs, so why not a plant?"

Submitted to the American Journal of Biology, where it was later chosen to be the centennial cover issue for the journal, Benca's illustration of a late Devonian Period lycopod is a three dimensional, life-like computer rendering of the species that looks like a perfect still photograph. Lush in its yellows and greens, that darken closer to the base of the stem, Benca was able to use an understanding of the species' photosynthetic activity to give this image a colorful appeal.

The species, Leclercqia scolopendra also known as centipede clubmoss, has transcended the "age of fishes" with Benca's rendering bringing them back to a life-like state. The hook-like leaves each individually unique, Benca took a compressed flat image that lay for 375 million years at the base of a rock and interpreted the fossil into a surreal doppelganger of the species as it originally grew. 

Benca and his co-authors originally constructed their journal entry to demonstrate scientific advancements that are helping paleobotanists (scientists who study fossilized remnants of plants) to interpret physiology and functional structure of ancient plant fossils with ever-increasing confidence. Since living clubmosses continue to carry many genetic and phenotypic traits that their ancestor lycopods had, the research team tested their method with Benca's personal treasure trove of lycopod species, which he has been growing since high school.

Aside from being particularly rare and difficult to find, early land plant fossils are often only stem fragments, which does not allow for scientists to discern species nor form. However, utilizing Benca's approach of turning the evolutionary dial back and using current living species with many derived traits as their models, scientists will be able to construct much more realistic renderings that are closest to what the species actually looked like.

"The way we analyzed Leclercqia material makes it possible to gain more information from these fragments" Benca said. " [Which is ] increasing our sample size of discernible fossils"