Smithsonian Voices

From the Smithsonian Museums

Vera Korasidis

Dr. Vera Korasidis is a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History. As a paleopalynologist in the Department of Paleobiology, Vera is carrying out a research project titled “Terrestrial pollen carbon isotope record and ecology across the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.”

56 million-year-old fossil pollen grains collected from Wyoming and photographed on the NMNH’s scanning electron microscope.

Tiny Fossils, Big Insight; How We Can Use Fossil Pollen to Understand Earth’s Climate History

As a palynologist, I study microscopic fossil spores and pollen that were produced by plants for reproduction. Pollen is highly important to the future of every plant and is made of an incredibly resilient substance (sporopollenin) ensuring that pollen can be preserved in rocks for hundreds of millions of years.

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