TWO hundred million years ago, southern Sweden teemed with lush vegetation where crocodiles and dinosaurs roamed — a Jurassic ecosystem palaeontologist Vivi Vajda and her team are reconstructing from fossil evidence.
Based at Stockholm’s Natural History Museum, Vajda studies pollen samples and fossils from Sweden’s southern Skåne province, where deep ground cracks preserved Jurassic-era specimens through successive ice ages that erased traces elsewhere.
“When I see a pollen grain, I actually see the tree. I can see the tree and the ecosystem in front of me,” Vajda explained, projecting microscopic specimens onto her office wall. The researchers pieced together fossil fragments — footprints, teeth, leaf imprints — from museum archives, identifying species and collaborating with an illustrator to recreate local Jurassic ecosystems.
Their work, published as an illustrated book in October 2025, revealed surprising biodiversity: dense greenery of ferns, primitive conifers and marsh plants, starkly different from today’s Scandinavian landscapes. “We find them in the same area, within a few hundred metres of rock,” Vajda said, noting the reconstruction likely reflects actual ground cond i – tions.
“It was kind of surprising to see that it was such lush vegetation.” Though fossils provide only “a snapshot of one time interval,” comparing older and younger specimens allows scientists to track how climate change and biodiversity shifted over time, bringing prehistoric plants and animals back to life for both research and public understanding.
AFP
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