PLANTS IN THE AGE OF DINOSAURS:

reprinted from
LA TIMES
CALIFORNIA CLASSROOM A LEARNING LINK TO THE MILDRED E. MATHIAS BOTANICAL GARDEN AT UCLA

Have you ever heard of the Mesozoic Era? It is the time in history, about 250 million years ago, when dinosaurs lived on Earth. Many of them were herbivores. That meansthey ate plants.

Some dinosaurs built their nests in plants. Can you think of other ways the dinosaursmay have used plants?

Dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago, but many of the plants from that era still grow today. Some of the plants include cycads, ferns, the ginkgo biloba tree and the dawn redwood.

Cycads look like little palm trees and produce cones. Ferns come in many forms and sizes and produce spores. These spores are located on the underside of the leaves and look like brown dots or stripes.The ginkgo tree, which comes from Asia, has fan-shaped leaves. The dawn redwood existed 90 million to 15 million years ago and is possibly the tallest tree in North America.

You can see these prehistoric plants and about 5,000 others at the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden at UCLA in Westwood.For more information, call (310) 825-1260 or visit http:// www.botgard.ucla.edu.
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This learning link was provided by Carol Felixson from the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden at UCLA.

A crayon and watercolor illustration shows cycad plants and a type of dinosaur called a dilophosaurus, by Julian Massud Sharifi, 9, of Long Beach.