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Re: Pine trees and paleoartists
Are there tropical species of pine trees that I don't know about,
because in my opinion, pine trees look seriously out of
place in a landscape that's supposed to be hot and muggy.
This has an easy answer: angiosperms (which include all surviving
broad-leaved trees except *Ginkgo* and *Gnetum*) only evolved in the Early
Cretaceous; tree-shaped angiosperms are not known before about the beginning
of the Late Cretaceous; and angiosperm forests stayed rare till much later.
Tropical rainforests in more or less the modern sense appeared only in the
In contrast, broad-leaved conifers are known from the Mesozoic. One of them,
the Late Jurassic *Podozamites*, has been found with dragonfly eggs on its
Most angiosperms have much broader vessels than conifers and ginkgos. This
allows them to grow faster, and that's why they dominate the warm parts of
the globe today. On the other hand, the water in those broad vessels freezes
more easily, and that's why there are still huge conifer forests in the cold
parts of the globe.
Also, what's with the volcanoes smoking in the background?
Most of them are nonsense, and therefore absent from serious artwork from
the last 20 years.