JURASSIC PLANTS

The dinosaurs roaming the fictional Jurassic Park might have been reconstituted from paleo-DNA, but the landscape was not. You can still find plenty of plants from dinosaur days at the local nursery.

You won’t find the poisonous Serenna veriformans, which, in the book, tipped off paleobotanist Ellie Sattler that not all was right in the park. Author Michael Crichton seems to have hybridized that one on his own.

But you will find ferns, cycads, horsetails, metasequoias, cypress, pines and ginkgoes. All of these existed around 200 million years ago, and still do today. Maybe they’re not the exact same species, but they’re often the same genera--close enough in appearance so that only a paleobotanist could tell them apart, and even they can’t always be sure.

The problem with identifying prehistoric plants, explained real-life paleobotanist Bruce Tiffney at UC Santa Barbara, is that one seldom finds entire plants as fossils, just bits and pieces; a leaf here, a branch somewhere else.

But what they do find often looks just like some of the plants we grow today. And, as Larry Barnes, a paleontologist at the Los Angeles County Museum

of Natural History, pointed out, we can grow just about all of these prehistoric plants in Southern California, thanks to our mild climate.

You could actually plant a dinosaur habitat in your back yard, just for fun, or in case some genetic engineering firm does decide to clone pet dinos, an idea briefly contemplated by the fictitious InGen company in the novel.

A dinosaur garden has, in fact, been planted for children at the American Horticultural Society’s River Farm in Virginia, laid out by paleontologist Peter Kranz. And at the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia there is a huge collection of cycads, plus a few other prehistoric plants that grow well in our climate. The idea was to make it a dinosaur garden, but for of lack of funding, it never got off the ground.

Cycads and ferns predominate in fossil records.

Some paleontologists think that there were vast “fern prairies,” akin to today’s African savannas, feeding huge herds of dinosaurs. But paleobotanist Tiffney doesn’t think so: “Ferns are great dinosaur fodder, but I don’t find any evidence of them covering vast amounts of ground. Like today, they grow in low, moist areas.”

Surprisingly, Tiffney thinks that much of dinosaur country probably looked like inland Southern California, or maybe the slightly rainier areas of north-central Mexico.

He thinks the vegetation was widely scattered, not dense, and that there were no great herds, just small roaming groups of dinosaurs. Recent dinosaur paintings that reconstruct the past are beginning to reflect this more sparse look in their background vegetation. The sticky-wet jungle-look is passing from favor, except perhaps in movies.

Of course, there were many habitats, not just one. Paintings often depict great forests, like the one preserved in Petrified Forest National Park, or the one still growing in Sequoia National Park. This was an age of big trees as well as big animals.

Or paintings show low swampy ground. At the dinosaur garden at River Farm, paleontologist Kranz created an authentic mudhole in the garden, complete with dinosaur tracks around its edge.

If you were making your own back yard Jurassic Park, you couldn’t have a lawn because grasses didn’t appear in the plant record until long after the dinosaurs were history.

You couldn’t have many flowers in the garden either, because flowering plants didn’t evolve until the middle Cretaceous period, after the Jurassic, about 115 million years ago.

But neither did the star attraction of Jurassic Park, Tyrannosaurus rex. He actually came along after the Jurassic period, in the early Cretaceous.

Change the name to Cretaceous Park, and you could include the greatest variety of dinosaurs, including T. rex, and the first flowering plants, because the two overlapped during that geologic period. The sycamore was one early flowering plant still growing happily in our local canyons. The magnolia was another.

You could surround your mudhole with ferns, horsetails and, further from the water, cycads.

Horsetails go back at least 300 million years, which makes them a genuine antique in the garden. And they look it, being simple hollow stems that easily pull part. They do have leaves, although they don’t look like the leaves we are accustomed to, and all produce spores, not seeds, in cone-like structures at the very tip of the plant. Back then there were many more kinds, some assuming tree-size proportions, growing up to 65 feet tall in the fossil records.

Tiffney grows some of the present-day survivors in his own garden, although he keeps them confined in a open-ended sewer pipe set into the ground so they can’t spread all over the place. You don’t want horsetails to get out of their cage any more than Muldoon, the gamekeeper at Jurassic Park, wanted the velociraptors to get out of theirs.

A proper Jurassic Park would have many kinds of ferns, which appeared about 250 million years ago. They came in many sizes, from tree ferns, similar to today’s Australian and New Zealand tree ferns common in gardens, to ground-covering kinds and vining types. Although you may not find a climbing fern at the local nursery, they still exist. Fern fanciers grow several, including the Japanese climbing fern Lygodium japonicum .

You would also want more than a few cycads. They were abundant in the Jurassic period.

Cycads look like a cross between a fern and a palm tree (although there were no palms in Jurassic times and they are not related)--a clump of stiff, unpalatable foliage growing on a sturdy trunk. Some kinds branch to become tree-like. The misnamed sego palm is the most common in gardens, but there are many others treasured by collectors.

They date back about 250 million years and are still widely scattered over the globe, found from Florida and South America to the Philippines, in Australia, Asia and South Africa. Most cycads need partial shade and are best grown in a well-drained soil (in a raised bed or on soil that has been mounded up). They are easy to grow in containers because they grow so slowly and they are first-class indoor plants. They need only average water.

You’ll have no trouble finding trees for your personal Jurassic Park. Conifers--trees that have cones instead of flowers--abounded, beginning some 230 million years ago.

Pines, cedars and podocarpus all have ancient look-alikes. They are tall enough for a sauropod or apatosaurus (commonly called a brontosaurus) to nibble on, but not too tall for most gardens. These quadrapeds browsed about 30 feet off the ground. (But, according to UCLA paleobiologist Charles Marshall, they did not chew in a cow-like fashion as in the movie, being unable to move their jaws from side-to-side. Mammals first learned how to do that.)

The araucarias, or monkey puzzle trees, are particularly primitive-looking conifers, so it shouldn’t surprise many gardeners that indeed they are. Triceratops and stegosaurus probably browsed beneath them and they are prominent in many of the paintings that seek to reconstruct dinosaur times, being very big trees (to 100 feet) with very heavy cones (to 10 pounds).

You do not want to plant one over a patio, but they make interesting patio trees in a pot, growing happily in a container for many years. A favorite for this purpose, often sold as a living Christmas tree, is the Norfolk Island pine, which is not a pine at all, but an araucaria.

Present-day types are found only in the Southern Hemisphere, but they still make big forests.

Agathis are another member of the Araucariacae family that dates back to dinosaur days. We can grow one, A. robusta , the Queensland kauri, a dramatic 75-foot tower of extremely glossy leaves.

The ginkgo, probably the best-known fossil tree, was thought extinct until discovered growing in a remote and undoubtedly misty region of China, in only 1956. This is a magnificent garden tree, as broad as a brontosaurus, that carpets the ground with golden leaves in the fall. It too is a conifer, not a flowering plant, despite its leafy looks.

Metasequoias, ancestors of the sequoias, were another common tree, though in the early Cretaceous. “At a T. rex site in South Dakota this past summer, the little cones kept rolling out of the rock as we dug,” says J. D. Stewart, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History.

They were also thought to be extinct until discovered still growing in China. Metasequoias make handsome garden trees, looking like a redwood but with this surprising trait: They’re deciduous and lose their needles in autumn.

Put all of these prehistoric plants together and you could have your own personal Jurassic Park--a few tall trees with an understory of cycads and tree ferns, plus that decorative mudhole.

And if they do get around to reconstituting dinosaurs, you might want to consider, as a pet, one of the small insectivorous types, like the two-foot-high Saltopus , that paleontologist J. D. Stewart told us about. It would be just the right size for a pet, probably couldn’t jump the fence and, best of all, eats insects, not you or your garden.

Oh yes, insects were in great abundance then as now, so a personal Jurassic Park would not be pest-free. But imagine how many insects a two-foot-tall dinosaur must have eaten. Today’s tomato horn worms wouldn’t stand a chance.

JURASSIC PLANTS

HORSETAILS Dominating the landscape 400 million years ago, horsetails were already ancient plants and in decline when the dinosaurs arrived. Some kinds reached tree-like proportions growing in great bogs that later became the world’s coal deposits. Today’s survivors continue to aggressively colonize wet ground.

FERNS Ferns, also found in boggy coal deposts some 250 million years ago, were among the first plants to have recognizable leaves, though they reproduce from primitive one-celled spores, as do algae and mosses, and not seeds. They are still plentiful where moisture is, including kinds that grow to tree size.

CONE-BEARING Cone-bearing plants came next, including the ginkgo, which reached it’s zenith in the Jurassic period, 150 million years ago. Thought to be extinct, it was discovered alive and well in China in 1956, a living fossil. Today it is propering in gardens, valued for it’s fall color.

CYCADS Cycads dominated the dinosaurs’ landscape with fossils found from California to India. They are still widely scattered over the globe and, in their botanical structure, they are halfway between ferns and the modern flowering plants that first appeared near the end of the dinosaurs’ reign.

A PLANT TIMELINE

Timeline below shows plants growing to day and the period in which they, or close relatives, first appeared on Earth. If you would like more plants for your garden, try some of these. Scale is in millions of years

4600: PRECAMBRIAN * Bacteria * Algae * Fungi

540: CAMBRIAN

510: ORDOVICIAN

438: SILURIAN * Club mosses

410: DEVONIAN * Liverworts * Horsetails

355: CARBONIFEROUS * Mosses * Ferns * First conifers

290: PERMIAN * Cycads * Ginkgoes

250: TRIASSIC * Pines * Cypress

205: JURASSIC * Araucaria

140: CRETACEOUS * Flowering plants * Angiosperms * Sycamore relatives * Ephedra (Mormon tea) * Metasequoia

65: TERTIARY * Magnolia * Dogwood * First grass * First daisy

Sources: Bruce Tiffney, UC Santa Barbara; J.D. Stewart, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.