“There are great color reconstructions of dinosaurs, so why not a plant?” thought Department of Integrative Biology and UCMP grad student Jeff Benca when he set out to reconstruct the appearance of a 375-million-year-old Devonian plant. Using Adobe Illustrator CS6 software, he constructed a striking three-dimensional, full-color portrait of a stem of the lycopod Leclercqia scolopendra, or centipede clubmoss. This was no small feat, considering that the fossil plant Jeff was illustrating was a two-dimensional compression.

The illustration appears in a paper by Jeff and coauthors Maureen Carlisle, Silas Bergen, and UCMP alum Caroline Strömberg in the March 2014 issue of the American Journal of Botany. Jeff’s illustration graces the cover of the issue (see photo above).

Read more about Jeff and his work with fossil and living lycopods at the UC Berkeley Newscenter. Read the abstract for the paper, “Applying morphometrics to early land plant systematics: A new Leclercqia (Lycopsida) species from Washington State, USA.”