Description

Undescribed Angiosperm Seed
Late Cretaceous
Judith River Formation
Central Montana, USA

Excellent black nut, 0.6 inches (15mm) in grey matrix. Unusual.

Here’s a plant fossil occasionally found in the Judith River Formation.  It looks sort of like a sunflower seed but the earliest proposed relative of true sunflowers did not appear until the Middle Eocene (30 million years later). We are pretty sure a Cretaceous truck driver did not spit this out of his truck window because there were no trucks in the Cretaceous.