Paleobotany

The paleobotany macrofossil collection includes specimens, mainly from North America, that range from the Devonian to the Pleistocene but with a focus on the Cenozoic.

In particular, the Burke holds one of the world’s largest collections of Cenozoic floras for the Pacific Northwest region (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia). These floras, many of which are considered to be Lagerstätten because of their exceptional preservation, have produced 57 holotypes.

Highlights: Compression floras (and associated insects, fish, and bird feathers) from the Eocene of Washington and BC (e.g., Republic, McAbee, Princeton) providing unique windows into the warmest period on Earth in the last 66 million years; Miocene compression floras (and associated pollen, phytoliths, diatoms, and insects) from the Miocene of Washington and Idaho (e.g., Clarkia), deposited in lakes that formed when the Columbia River Basalts dammed river valleys.

The collection consists primarily of permineralized wood formed during the early to middle Miocene when extensive Columbia River flood basalts covered large parts of the Pacific Northwest. This includes collections made by G.F. Beck. Thin-sections have been made of many of these specimens.

Highlight: Miocene of Washington (e.g., Vantage).

The phytolith collection consists of slides and vials of biosilica (phytoliths, diatoms, sponge spicules, chrysophyte cysts) extracted from Cretaceous to Pleistocene sediment samples from all over the world (North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa). Many of the sediment samples were collected from faunal sites.

Highlights: Cenozoic of North America (e.g., Great Plains, northern Rocky Mountains, and Pacific Northwest); Cenozoic of southern South America; late Cretaceous of India

Burke paleobotany hosts a small cleared leaf collection featuring temperate hardwood forest leaves.

The large collection consists of over 5,000 hand specimens of wood from 150 plant families worldwide.

Highlights: Exemplars of wood from 150 families worldwide, donated by University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences; Professor Emeritus Minze Stuiver’s reference collection of wood, with which he pioneered using radiocarbon in tree-rings to study solar activity.

The phytolith plant collection consists of 2,000 slides and vials of phytoliths extracted from modern plant taxa, with leaves, reproductive structures, stem/wood and roots extracted separately. A little less than half of the samples are from grasses (Poaceae); the rest are from a wide variety of mainly land plants (e.g., bryophytes, ferns, and conifers), with a major focus on angiosperms.

Our small phytolith soil assemblage collection features phytolith assemblages extracted from soil samples from mainly North and South America.

Highlights: Phytoliths from plant genera and families present in North and South America today; from grasses, sampled broadly across the Poaceae phylogeny, and their closest living relatives; from soil samples of a range of vegetation types from Costa Rica and New Zealand.

Our extensive collection of modern pollen consists of over 6,000 slides and vials of pollen from a wide range of taxa from the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.

Highlight: Jane Gray’s modern reference collection focusing on taxa from temperate forests of North America and East Asia.