Palm trees in Vancouver? Plant fossils suggest B.C. once had a warmer climate

There was a time when Burnaby Mountain, and the areas around it along B.C.’s south coast, was a warmer, less mountainous region where palm trees grew, according to new research that identified plant fossils unearthed at the site more than 50 years ago. 

When Simon Fraser University was being built in the late 1960s, paleobotanist Rolf Mathewes was an undergraduate, and he helped gather dozens of plant fossils at a deposit exposed by the construction site. The fossils date back to around 40 million years ago.

SFU then locked the specimens in cabinets, where they remained largely untouched for decades.

Now a professor at