Mahogany tree family dates back to the dinosaurs era, new discovery shows

[FfFfFfFF 58,135]

Mahogany is a commercially important wood, valued for its hardness and beauty. The United States is the world's top importer of the tropical timber from leading producers like Peru and Brazil. 

For science, mahogany is important, too—the fossil presence of the mahogany family is a telltale of where tropical forests once stood. Until recently, paleobotanists had only found evidence the mahogany family extended back to the Paleocene (about 60 million years ago).

Now, a new paper written by University of Kansas researcher Brian Atkinson in the American Journal of Botany shows the mahogany family goes back millions of years more, to the last hurrah of the dinosaurs, the Cretaceous.

"For understanding when many of the different branches of the tree of life evolved, we're primarily dependent on the fossil record," said Atkinson, an assistant professor of ecology & evolutionary biology and curator in the Biodiversity Institute's Division of Paleobotany. "In this case, Meliaceae, the mahogany family, is an ecologically and economically important group of trees. A lot of researchers have used this group as a study system to better understand the evolution of tropical rainforests. This work is the first definitive evidence that the tropically important trees were around during the Cretaceous period, when we first start to see the modernization of ecosystems and modern groups of plants."

The well-preserved mahogany specimen Atkinson analyzed was discovered just off Vancouver Island in Canada and was collected by a local fossil collector.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-04-mahogany-tree-family-dates-hurrah.html

[Maleficent 6]

well my family tree dates back to 1811 so the mahogany‘s can gargle my b**ls

[Antichrist 9,818]

you really like old stuff, dont u?

 

gold digger bitch

 

[Woolfsmck 2,763]

so mahogany makes old ass woodies?

[Twitter 14]

I love a good science tag thread. 

[Cindy Taylor 2]

And I’m about to provide more comprehensive insight into what I’ve been through with essayedge review. The trees of some families living in tropical rainforests have trunks that look like organ pipes, and so far no one has been able to explain the reason for this feature. Reports from botanists who have studied tropical forests in many areas of the Old World suggest that such corrugated tree trunks are quite common. It is noteworthy that in humid tropical forests, in addition, buttresses (board-like roots) are often observed. Maybe such corrugation is the rudimentary buttresses?