When paleobotanist David Dilcher hiked the time-worn trails at Itasca Biological Station and Laboratories this fall, he was completing the circle on a journey that began 51 years before—and led to the Lower Cretaceous and back.
Discoverer of the oldest known fossil flower and widely considered the father of modern angiosperm paleobotany, Dilcher got a taste of the amazing complexity and diversity of plant life while wandering the woods at Itasca as a University of Minnesota undergraduate student in the 1950s. Piling a bunch of fellow students in the Biology Club, into a borrowed station wagon, then-natural history student Dilcher would drive up to the field station in the spring to study ephemeral woodland wildflowers.
“That was a fantastic time,” he says. “I would go out with a small handbook called Spring Flowering Plants and walk along the trail. When I found a spring flower, I’d sit down next to it, open this book up, detail all the characteristics of this plant, identify it, then do the next one. I suppose it was like bird watching, except spring flower watching.”
