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How could this be here? Was there some gap in the stone that allowed last year's deciduous leaves to sneak underneath the layers and become compacted in a cushion of organic debris? The spreading tributaries of the plant's veins looked too delicate to be fossil. But this wasn't some soppy autumn leaf I could easily pull off the rock, and there was no whiff of organic decay. Not to mention that among the surrounding landscape nothing stood taller than waist-high sagebrush. There were no trees here to shake off such leaves. The piece of organic debris was literally set in stone, a deep and pervasive shade of rust instead of the vibrant green that had been touched by Cretaceous sunlight. Maybe I had missed the dinosaur, but I couldn't hold back a toothy grin of my own. This was better. Wandering out into the desert and searching for a specific dinosaur species is a fool's errand. Paleontology has survived as a discipline because experts have learned to be grateful for what the fortunes of preservation and the luck of discovery have brought to them, a field built upon what we just happen to find. It's not all that different from when you go to the park as a kid and come home with a curiously smooth pebble or a katydid in a jar that you hadn't known existed until you happened upon it. And even then, what are such treasures outside of their setting? You can learn a katydid's shape through the glass of a mason jar but not how the animal lives; just as you can appreciate that the pebble came from the riverbank but not the motion of the water that polished it down into something to keep on your bookshelf or the billions of years of geologic history that led to its formation. The same holds for dinosaurs and myriad other forms of prehistoric life. A T. rex that's excavated, plastered, hauled away from its home rock, driven to a museum, unpacked, and carefully freed from its ancient sediment tells you about the animal's skeletal system and perhaps a smattering of other biological cues, but precious little about the world that animal inhabited—all the ways the life of that one, unique Tyrannosaurus intersected with the Earth of 66 million years ago.

Alone, a dinosaur is meaningless. We put them on literal pedestals in our museums, behind glass and railings as befits their place as the world's most ancient and long-standing celebrities. But what is a Tyrannosaurus without a forest to conceal its shadow as it stalks? What is a Triceratops without a buffet of ferns and cycad fronds to eat? What is a Mesozoic world without the busy machinations of pollen-collecting beetles and nectar-drinking butterflies that assisted the innumerable, vegetal lives that set the basis for so many other living things to exist? The fossil leaves I turned up from those tan rocks in Montana said more about the world of T. rex and her neighbors—the temperature, the rainfall, and forest—than a multi-ton enigma of which we are still striving to understand the biological basics. Even if you had complete skeletons of every single dinosaur species in a specific environment, imagining how they interacted would be a glorified version of mashing together dinosaur models in a sandbox. We need to know the stories of those smaller, but no-less-vibrant lives that surrounded and fed the terrible lizards. Ripped away from Earth's botanical history, life on our planet doesn't make the least bit of sense.

What's true of the past also applies to the present. We often depict plants as little more than the static background for animal behavior—grasslands are sustenance and setting for gazelle, rafts of duckweed conceal lurking alligators, and tigers need forests of the night to burn so brightly in. Even within the confines of our own experience, plants are often part of an inert-seeming landscape until they have some direct effect on our day-to-day lives. We'll get annoyed at annual influxes of pollen that coat our cars and send us into sneezing fits, weeds growing in the yard embody a hated chore to get around to some mild Sunday morning, and vegetables become dietary homework shoved to the sides of our plates, even as we close our eyes in relief under the shade of a summertime tree and drive out of our way to catch the one autumn day when every stand of forest seems aflame with color. We recognize that plants are alive, as we are, and yet we hold them apart. Plants become lives without mind and feeling, not so different from the soil out of which they grow. Who would stop to ponder the life of a Woods' rose or even a blade of grass? We are surrounded by all this verdant life—our own existence dependent upon it—but we generally lack the patience to confront what we don't know about the maple growing through the fence or the sunflowers raising their fibrous stalks from a roadside ditch. Our ignorance certainly colors what we understand of life's ever-expanding evolutionary panorama. Palms and conifers might frame a prehistoric scene where bizarre reptiles snarl at each other, but we tend not to ask about the lives that make up the habitats in which our favorite prehistoric creatures roamed. Such scenes are absolutely bursting with life, but it's challenging for us to think beyond the experiences of the toothy and reptilian.

Take a step back for a moment. Imagine your favorite dinosaur—or some other terrestrial creature if the saurians are not to your personal taste. Think of that animal carefully stepping through the evening forest, the low-angled glow of the sun sending shafts of orange and gold through the shadowy rows of tree trunks. That animal is moving through a grove of living things, not just knowable as individual plants but lives that are literally intertwined from canopy to runs sunken into the ground. Leaf-munching insects, lichen dotting the bark, fungus growing along the roots, and more, discernible from each other but all connected. The entire scene is alive, a tangle of stories so varied and intricate that you could start following a single, small thread of existence and spend the rest of your life tracing the snarled, pulsing web of life it's part of. As we imagine our prehistoric friend taking each step, we can envision that foot pressing into mud full of decayed plant matter, the whisper of the leaves as a breeze rustles the botanical neighborhood, the smell of flowers eager for pollinators—not simply envisioning the forest but sensing it. What I'm asking you is not just what you see in your mind's eye, but what an ancient forest might have felt like.