Description

Middle Miocene (Seldovian)
Sucker Creek Formation – Sucker Creek Flora
Malheur County, Oregon, USA
9mm nut on 51mm slab.

Seed. Plant.

Isolated seeds are difficult-to-impossible to identify even by an expert if they are not known from specimens connected to other parts of the plant.  This is often the case with extinct plants from the Paleozoic or Mesozoic with no modern relatives or with Cenozoic plants that have very similar seeds.

Plant collectors tend to look for seeds that look different from what they have or are upgrades of what they have. Those fossil collectors who look for a little of everything might want a seed like this one because some detail is preserved – a nice example – and we don’t see as many plant fossils from Oregon as we did in the 80’s and 90’s.