Diamond shines new light on fossil plant

The team of palaeontologists, geochemists and physicists investigated the chemistry of exceptionally preserved fossil leaves from the Eocene-aged ‘Green River Formation’ of the western United States by striking the fossils with X-rays produced by synchrotron particle accelerators.

Researchers from Manchester University and Diamond Light Source and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource in the US have published their findings in Metallomics.

Lead author Dr Nicholas Edwards, a postdoctoral researcher at Manchester University, said: ‘The synchrotron has already shown its potential in teasing new information from fossils. With this study, we wanted to use the same techniques to see whether we could extract a similar level of biochemical information from a completely different part of the tree of life.

‘To do this we needed to test the chemistry of the fossil plants to see if the fossil material was derived directly from the living organisms or degraded and replaced by the fossilisation process.