The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
In Our Time: Science
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The Evolution of Plant Life
Plants are really brilliant for kind of making interpretations about past climates if you have fossil records of them. So we have a... it's called leaf margin analysis and it's essentially a paleo tool for figuring out temperature. If you have a more jagged edge on a plant leaf that is associated with cooler temperatures, then you have with leaves that have smooth edges. And so when we look to the past and we see assemblages of plants that are dominated by jagged leaf edges, we can know that temperatures would have been cooler than assemblages that aredominated by smooth edges. The size of the leaves can tell us about precipitation. When we see big leaves, we know that
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