Evidence of earliest spore-producing land plants unearthed in Oman

Evidence of the earliest-ever land plants that produced spores were unearthed in Oman by a team from Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) and the University of Sheffield in the UK.

Prior to the find, evidence of the existence of spore-producing plants on earth dated to no earlier than 425 million years ago. According to the research team, their discovery has pushed this date back a further 50 million years.

According to a spokesperson of the PDO, the discovery was made from rock samples taken during oil well explorations in central Oman. "The rock samples were taken and research was carried out to determine the findings," the spokesperson told Gulf News yesterday.

The findings, written in a research paper, have been accepted for publication by by the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

The team – consisting of Peter Osterloff, who until recently worked at PDO, Uzma Mohiuddin Mohammed of PDO and Dr Charles Wellman of Sheffield University – found the evidence while conducting geological studies of the subsurface Safiq Formation. This formation originated in the Ordovician period almost half a billion years ago.

"Microscopic examinations of samples of rocks extracted from wells are regularly conducted at PDO," said the spokesperson from the oil company. This is done since microfossils in the samples can help geologists to date the rocks and also provide information on what the environment was like hundreds of millions of years ago. This in turn helps the Company to track down the rocks in which hydrocarbons were formed and trapped.

Uzma explained: "It was while I was working on my MSc thesis under Dr Wellman's supervision that we became intrigued by the excellent preservation and diversity of the fossil material from PDO's Ghaba-1 borehole.

"We decided to do a more detailed study of it. We found spores within spore-producing bodies in the material that looked very similar to the spores of existing liverwort plants. Since liverworts are generally accepted as being amongst the most primitive extant land plants, we had direct evidence that these fossil spores were produced by the earliest land plants."

As a result of the work, the team wrote a paper entitled "Tantalising fragments of the earliest land plants". The paper describes tiny fragments of possibly the first land plants to originally produce the microfossils the team had observed.

"This is a significant discovery as it sheds light on a number of controversies concerning the origin of land plants and their fossil record," said PDO's Head of Geological Services Jan Schreurs.

"It provides the first direct evidence that the earliest land plants produced abundant spores.

"The value of this study can be gauged by the fact that Nature has accepted their paper – a rare honour indeed," he added.