Paleobotany translates roughly from Greek as "the study of old plants." It is focused on cataloguing ancient plants to explore prehistory. The plants found on Earth millions of years ago, were just as different from modern plants as dinosaurs were from present-day birds and reptiles. Scientists can learn a lot about the makeup of the ancient Earth's weather conditions, the diets of prehistoric animals, and the evolution of life around the globe, by studying "old plants."

This discipline looks at common plants like trees and ferns, but also encompasses marine organisms like seaweed and algae. Paleobotanists work closely with archaeologists. Teams gather fossils of leaves and petrified plant matter. These samples can be preserved in a variety of ways, such as impressions in sediment, petrifaction (the buildup of minerals over millennia inside the remains of the plant), or fusain, like charcoal remains after a fire. These fossils are usually partially destroyed, and take a specialist to identify.

Scientists can preserve samples in chemicals like silicon to outline minute details which show their internal structure. They study the chemical composition of the soil or stone around the fossil to figure out what the conditions were. They also determine the age of the plant via carbon dating to set it within the fossil record.

The oldest plant fossils discovered thus far were found in Argentina in 2010 by researchers from the Argentine Institute of Snow, Ice and Environmental Research. The samples were proven to be over 472 million years old.

Kaspar Maria von Sternberg is considered to be the father of paleobotany. He was born in 1761 in what is now the Czech Republic, and is most famous for his extensive study of plant fossils and his establishment of the Bohemian National Museum in Prague.

However, Paleobotany crops up all throughout human history. One of the earliest paleobotanists, though he did not call himself by that title, was Shen Kuo, a Chinese scientist who lived in the 11^th Century. He discovered petrified bamboo fossils in an area in which bamboo did not grow. This led him to propose a theory of climate change, one of the earliest in history.

By collecting vast amounts of fossils from the same time-period, scientists can get an idea what specific ecosystems used to look like. This allowed us to figure out major extinction events, climate conditions, and genealogies of organisms which lived millions of years ago. We understand a lot about our natural world-for example, the origins of coal, a substance created through millennia of plant and animal matter decomposing into peat under heavy pressure. This gives us clues to the origins of our animal ancestors, as well as our impact on the environment today... and whether we are heading for an extinction event of our own. Over time, paleobotany will help shed light on the history of life on Earth.

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