Dr. Scott Wing
Department of Paleobiology - Smithsonian NMNH

Topic: A new approach to using fossil plants for testing deep time climate models

Abstract: Paleobotanical reconstructions of paleoclimate have historically relied on fairly strong uniformitarian assumptions that extinct plants have similar climatic tolerances to their living relatives or analogs. I will talk about a new approach to testing paleoclimate simulations by examining how consistent they are with geographic distributions of fossil plants rather than by converting the fossil plants to quantitative estimates of paleoclimate.