WASHINGTON, D.C.- A team of scientists, including several from the Smithsonian Institution, discovered that leaves of flowering plants in the world’s first rainforests had more veins per unit area than leaves ever had before. They suggest that this increased the amount of water available to the leaves, making it possible for plants to capture more carbon and grow larger. A better plumbing system may also have radically altered water and carbon movement through forests, driving environmental change. “It’s fascinating that a simple leaf feature such as vein density allows one to study plant performance in the past,” said Klaus Winter, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, who was not an author. “Of course, you can’t directly measure water flow through fossil leaves. When plants fix carbon, they lose water to the atmosph