SCIENTIST FINDS OLDEST PLANT OF NON-MARINE WORLD

Harvard science marches on, and the store of the world's knowledge is increased thereby. Today it becomes known that through the efforts of Cambridge research workers the known age of higher plant forms on earth has been substantially doubled.

Fossil remains of the world's oldest land plant, a primitive shoot of the Cambrian era, 500,000,000 years age, have been found by a local paleobotanist in black oil shale from Sweden.

William C. Darrah, instructor in Botany and research curator of the Botanical Museum, made the discovery from specimens obtained abroad by Edward C. Jeffrey, professor of Plant Morphology, emeritus, and Alfred C. Lane '83, former professor of Geology and Mineralogy at Tufts.

Available evidence previous to this find indicated that plant life emerged from the water first in the Uppermost Silurian period, almost 300,000,000 years ago.

Scientists have believed for some time that Cambrian animal life, as revealed in existing fossils, must have depended on land plants for part of their diet. But such indirect evidence for the existence of vegetable forms has never before been confirmed by finding the remains of the plants themselves.

Darrah made his identification by a new process he has perfected, and through which it is possible to peel from a specimen a transparent cross-section, one twenty-five thousandth of an inch thick for microscopic study.