Entry # 4: Living Fossil

Wednesday, February 23, 2017
Carolina Beach, NC

It is twilight, the time of "twin-lights," when the essences of day and night blend into a silver sheen. The magnolia's trunk stands in shadow, wearing a cloak of dark green. I look up through the canopy, to the brighter sky holding the sun's last rays. During twilight, one senses the fusion of diurnal and nocturnal elements. A mockingbird sings his repertoire of spring melodies while crickets and other insects begin a long night of fiddling. This dim hour between light and dark encourages journeys of the imagination. The door of day slowly closes as the door of night creaks open, allowing a moment of time travel. As I stand beside the grand magnolia between these doors of twilight, I am thinking about the passage of time. I wrap my arms around the trunk as we hurtle back to the Cretaceous Period during the evolution of magnolias when flowering plants first appeared on earth.

Magnolias and their relatives have lived on our planet for more than 100 million years. The order Magnoliales includes an ancient race of flowering trees. At the time of their evolution in the middle of the Cretaceous Period (144-65 mya), the continental masses were closer together than their current positions. India had already broken off from Antarctica and was slowly cruising towards it collision with what is now Asia. Water inundated the land masses creating inland seas. Iguanodons, Ankylosaurs, Tyrannosaurs and Ceratopsians stomped around in the warmer climate. My front yard, where the grand magnolia grows, was buried underwater in an ocean that reached more than 100 miles inland from its present shoreline.

About 66 million years ago, magnolias witnessed the catastrophic impact of the six-mile wide asteroid that struck an area near the Yucatan peninsula, unleashing a global storm of earthquakes, wildfires and tsunamis. In the aftermath, a rain of fireballs likely sizzled some dinosaurs in their tracks. Scientists speculate the resulting explosion created a tremendous cloud of sulfur-rich dust and vapor that blocked the sun, causing an "impact winter." The amount of sunlight striking the earth may have been reduced to 20% for several decades. Dinosaurs, mosasaurs, pterosaurs, ammonites, large numbers of bird species, four-fifths of all snake and lizard species, two-thirds of mammal species, and a significant percentage of bivalves became extinct. In her book, The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert tells us that "forests were decimated...diverse plant communities were replaced entirely by rapidly dispersing ferns." In spite of the dust, heat, and low levels of sunlight, the magnolia family survived.

Although we southerners like to think of magnolias as rightfully ours, fossil evidence suggests the birthplace of the magnolia lineage occurred in what is now southeast Asia. Over millions of years, while the continents were still relatively close together, magnolia species colonized North and Central America. Continental drift eventually created what taxonomists call a disjunct distribution of wild magnolias. The fossil record reveals that magnolias have thrived in widespread tropical and subtropical environments, retaining their primeval features. Writing in his book, The Natural Gardens of North Carolina (1932), B.W. Wells calls the magnolia a "'living fossil,' for it has come down little changed from the original type." Today more than 200 species in the genus Magnolia occur in the Old and New World.

It is nearly dark beneath the grand magnolia. I am safely back in the Anthropocene Epoch. Standing in the quiet of a warm night, I imagine the grand magnolia will soon respond to the changing season, replacing the old winter leaves with bright new growth. Just as magnolias have been doing for millions of years.