Nov 14
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I used to just like saying ginkgo, but I fell hard for the object itself when I found fossils of it in college (in samples in the lab, not in the field). It is a living fossil, older than dinosaurs, with recognized leaves from 270 million years ago. Wiki talks about it extensively over here; scroll down to see some fossils.

The leaves have this lovely flexible feel to them, with all the veins running parallel to each other the length of the leaf. The veins furl together at the edges where the leaf narrows. It almost feels as though you could unroll the stem into something as wide as the leaf itself, but I couldn’t. The leaves I collected remain quite soft still, when the maple and oak leaves are brittle and dry.