| Here is a fossil winged seed from an extinct species of spruce called Picea magna; it cannot be compared directly with any living spruce, although the specimen most closely resembles winged seeds produced by the modern Picea polita, the tiger-tail spruce now native to the volcanic soils of Japan; in actual size, the winged seed is 15mm long. Collected from the middle Miocene Aldrich Station Formation, Aldrich Hill, Nevada. |