Brunei's primaeval forests have been confirmed by fossil evidence

[ASEAN NOW Content Team]

 

One of the most difficult aspects of paleobotanist Peter Wilf's team's search for plant fossils on a windless, sun-drenched beach in Borneo was getting acclimated to a new set of instruments.

Because the moist earth they were probing for old plant waste had never fully hardened into stone, it disintegrated under all but the gentlest touch.

 

They discovered that if they could get a piece 30 centimetres (12 inches) across, they were doing okay — nothing like the 2-meter (6.5-foot) hunks of rock Wilf was used to carving out of Argentina's fossil beds.

And he had to operate with a penknife instead of a gas-powered drill or even a backhoe, which is part of a paleontologist's toolkit in locations like Wyoming, USA.

Wilf's associate J.W. Ferry Slik, a botanist at Brunei Darussalam University, observed, "You can virtually dig the fossils out by hand."

 

The crew had to work hard to remove fossilised leaves and other plant materials from two key locations in Brunei, which is located on Borneo's west coast.
It took months to dry them off and meticulously pack, permit, and ship them in luggage from Brunei to the United States.
But, in the end, the data uncovered by the researchers proved that the island's prehistoric forests were remarkably similar to those that exist now, dating back at least 4 million years.

 

More than 80% of the leaves they discovered belonged to the Dipterocarpaceae family, which includes large rainforest trees that underpin the island's modern-day forests, which are shared by Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

Wilf, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University and a faculty member of the university's Institutes of Energy and the Environment, stated, "This type of forest is ancient, and it's functioned more or less the same way for a long time."
This forest type is still present today on the island, anchoring ecosystems that support a diverse range of species.

 

The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ on March 24.

In an email to Mongabay, Charles Cannon, a botanist and director of the Center for Tree Science at the Morton Arboretum in the United States, said, "It is a fascinating description of a paleobotanical study that substantiates long-standing assumptions about the ancient nature of Bornean rainforest communities, in their composition and distribution."
Cannon (no connection to the study's author) stated he would have hoped to see the samples more thoroughly identified, but he was astonished the team was able to locate plant macrofossils "in these settings."

 

According to Robert Morley, a geologist with the consultancy Palynova Limited who wasn't involved in the study, "the study highlights ways that could further peel back the curtain on this region's past history."