Else Marie Friis facts for kids

Else Marie Friis (born 18 June 1947) is a Danish scientist who studies plants (a botanist) and ancient life forms (a paleontologist). She is a retired professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her important work has helped us understand how flowering plants evolved and how they reproduce.

Else Marie Friis's Early Life and Education

Else Marie Friis was born in Holstebro, Denmark. Her father was a bookseller. She grew up in Skive and finished high school in 1966. After high school, she spent a year in Paris, France. There, she became interested in geology, which is the study of Earth's rocks and history. Her brother, Henrik, was studying geology, which also inspired her.

In 1971, she started working as an assistant teacher in botany (the study of plants) and geology. She continued her studies at Aarhus University. She earned advanced science degrees in 1975 and 1980.

Discovering Ancient Flowers

Else Marie Friis is very interested in how flowering plants reproduce and how they are related to each other. She especially studies fossilized plant parts from the Cretaceous period, which was a very long time ago.

How Else Marie Friis Found Fossils

Early in her career, she studied lignite, a type of soft coal. She worked in lignite mines in Denmark from 1968 to 1972. She wanted to learn about the environment and climate in Denmark millions of years ago.

Scientists knew from fossilized pollen that flowering plants first appeared during the Cretaceous period. However, they didn't know what these early plants looked like. Most plant parts, especially delicate flowers, don't usually turn into fossils. It was thought that the first flowers were large, making them even less likely to be preserved.

Else Marie Friis and her team had a clever idea. They decided to look for very tiny pieces of charcoal in soft rocks. They thought that charcoal, formed during natural fires, would be much more likely to stay intact as a fossil. They would sieve (sift) crumbled rock and then use a microscope to look at the tiny pieces.

Amazing Discoveries

Using this method, Else Marie Friis found very small flowers, only a few millimeters long, that were about 80 million years old! She worked with other scientists, including Peter Crane and Kaj Pedersen. She also collaborated with Annie Skarby to find and identify many early Cretaceous flowers in southern Sweden.

Later, in sediments from the USA and Portugal, they found fossilized charcoal flowers that were 120 million years old. This discovery showed that flowering plants appeared even earlier in the Cretaceous period than previously thought. These ancient flowers seemed to belong to a group called Chloranthaceae. This group was a major part of the plant life back then, but today only a few species exist.

Other scientists around the world soon started using Else Marie Friis's technique to find ancient flowers.

Career Highlights

From 1980 to 1981, Else Marie Friis was a research scholar in London. There, she and Annie Skarby found rare fossilized flowers from the Cretaceous period. These fossils were so well preserved that scientists could place them within a modern plant group called Saxifragales.

She returned to Aarhus University in 1981. In 1987, she helped write a book about the origins of flowering plants. Later that year, she became the head of paleobotany (the study of ancient plants) at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. Throughout her career, she has identified and named over 200 different kinds of fossil flowering plants.

In 1999, she received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. She has also been a visiting professor at Zurich University.

Awards and Memberships

Else Marie Friis is a member of several important scientific groups, including:

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
• Royal Swedish Academy of Science
• Royal Physiographic Society in Lund, Sweden
• Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
• Chinese Academy of Sciences
• She is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.

She has received many awards for her work, such as:

• The Hans Gram Medal in 1985
• The Nils Rosén Linné Prize in botany in 1992
• The Rolf Dahlgren Prize in botany in 2005
• Sweden's Geologist of the Year in 2007
• Denmark's Geology Prize in 2011
• The Linnaeus gold medal in 2014
• Knight 1st Class of the Order of the Polar Star
• The Lapworth Medal from the Palaeontological Association in 2023