![]() With Ash, Chaney, and DeSoto, Byers published a description of the first-documented ancient fire scar in 2014 in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. There, paleobotanist Dan Chaney helped Byers take images of the cells under a microscope to send to tree-ring researcher Lucía DeSoto of the University of Coimbra in Portugal, who analyzed them. Byers eventually connected with the Smithsonian as he looked for experts who could answer his questions about the ancient wood. The cut-and-polished surface revealed that the cells were decipherable he could more distinctly see the band of stressed cells that can result from a fire scar. But as a self-admitted amateur at the time, he found a commercial stone cutter and a granite countertop polisher to do the job. “In retrospect, I should’ve taken it straight away to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,” Byers says. The paleobotanists had no search image.” Even though the existence of ancient fires was known from studies of charcoal from this geological period and place, Byers was surprised to find that no one had documented an example of a fire-scarred fossil tree.īyers decided to get the fossilized log cut in cross section to see if the cells of the wood could still be deciphered. When Byers reached Ash, the latter responded, “What’s a fire scar?” Byers recalls, “I realized that there was this disconnect between modern fire ecologists and the paleobotanists who had been looking at fossil trees. So he called the Petrified Forest National Park and eventually got the chief paleontologist on the phone, who referred Byers to Sidney Ash, a paleobotanist who had studied the park’s ancient wood for more than 30 years and who was then a retired professor at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (Ash passed away last year). ![]() ![]() To settle his curiosity about whether anyone had found a fossil fire scar on a specimen like his dad’s, Byers started searching for research or coverage about the topic-but he didn’t turn up anything. Although Byers had never studied ancient wood-he is an environmental consultant and has a PhD in biology-he had worked with researchers studying fire scars on modern wood in the 1980s after he had finished his graduate work.
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