Take a pass past The Natural History Museum , London , and transport yourself back in time with their brand new Evolution Garden . This five - year - long project to transform the space at the front and slope of the museum was unveiled last week and tick a noteworthy journey through 2.7 billion year of evolutionary plant biology . We caught up with Dr Paul Kenrick to obtain out more about what goes into make an Evolution Garden in the modern age .
As well as the telling bronze statue ofFern the diplodocus , the garden themselves have been transformed to retroflex Earth as it would have look during the unlike time periods as far back as theCarboniferousand Jurassic eras . Dr Kenrick is the Principal Researcher at the Natural History Museum and looks tight at the fossil criminal record to inform the decisions about the garden . But just how hard is it ?
“ It ’s quite challenging actually ” , explains Kenrick as we tolerate in the part of the garden comprise the carbonic period roughly 300 million years ago . enceinte amounts of that flora liveliness is extinct , but tree ferns share a growth human body with some of the earliest tree specie from the wood ecosystems we know about and are used to form the principal part of the young forest .
One of the main differences between Earth ’s plant life sentence today and back when the dinosaurs roamed is the lack offlowering plant . This means the environs is mostly immature , without the colouring material we see today , portray another challenge to the squad .
Mining and quarrying for ember have literally unearthed examples from the fossil book of the Carboniferous , help investigator like Kenrick discover what was arise in that ecosystem . A fossilised tree tree trunk from a sandstone fair game in Edinburgh , Scotland stands proudly at one last of the fern layer . Back in the Carboniferous the land was much more equatorial , explicate Paul , so we would have been looking at much more of a humid , " tropical rainforest type surround ” .
In the Jurassic section of the garden , we come to pieces of fossil Grant Wood under the tail end of Fern , one tumid specimen from Wiltshire and two from Dorset . “ These are pieces of wood that are 145 million years old , and they have been turned to stone , literally turn to Harlan Stone , so they are petrify . ”
Just behind is a works calledCycas revolutafrom Japan , reminiscent of the low plant that dinosaurs would have run into . The industrial plant is toxic mayhap as a survival scheme to avoid depredation .
Wollemi pines ( Wollemia)dotted throughout the next subdivision bring to mind conifer that would have grown alongside the dinosaur , while medal ( Trachycarpus ) which date back to the Cretaceous produce fruits . In the shallow rivulet , horsetails from the Mesozoic period run along the bottom of the side as they favor a wetting agent grow distance .
Overall , the garden is a total delight , from the science behind the cautiously chosen plants to the inlay fossil track that criss - cross the paths . But do n’t just take our word for it , see it for yourself at the Natural History Museum , London .
