Fossilized "alien plant" from 47 million years ago unlike anything alive today

This fossilized plant excavated in Green River Formation, Utah is entirely unlike anything living on Earth today. It lived 47 million years ago and hasn't been seen since. That's why scientists have named the mysterious plant "Othniophyton elongatum," Greek for "elongated alien plant."

From ScienceAlert:

[The plant] is not a member of the ginseng family, as scientists had initially speculated. Rather, the entire family of the newly named Othniophyton elongatum is extinct, suggesting that the history of flowering plants is more complicated than we knew[…]

Othniophyton elongatum specimens were first excavated from the Green River Formation in Utah, a particularly rich fossil bed dating back to the Eocene. Generally speaking, paleobotanists assume that

any plant fossils dating from the beginning of the Cenozoic 65 million years ago must be related to plants that are alive today, and Othniophyton elongatum was no exception.

"There are many things for which we have good evidence to put in a modern family or genus, but you can't always shoehorn these things," said Steven Manchester, curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Previously:
• Get help identifying that mystery plant you bought at the hardware store
• This scientist fed his own flesh to a Venus Flytrap