I found from the article below that professor Danin identified figures
of three types of plants in the Shroud of Turin

- chrysanthemum flowers,

thorns of Gundelia tournefortii and

leaves of Zygophyllum dumosum.

Hannu

(Text copied from a WORD document)
( Text: "Courtesy of Alan Whanger" above the missing figure of the
text )
(Professor mentioned in the text: Avinoam Danin of The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem)

----COPY BELOW----------
XVI International Botanical Congress: The Shroud of Turin Controversy
Returns


The Scientist 1999, 13(18):10

Published 13 September 1999

The topic of the last press conference on Monday, August 2, at the
XVI International Botanical Congress in St. Louis seemed to have
a nice mix of classical scientific observation, image analysis,
and palynology (pollen identification), as well as great historical
interest.
A team led by Avinoam Danin, a professor of evolution, systematics,
and ecology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, had tentatively
identified the ghosts of flowers past on the famed shroud of Turin.

1 The work resurrected the idea that the shroud held the body of
Christ,
countering radiocarbon dating evidence that it is of medieval origin.

2 This new look at an old story was sexy stuff, and by Tuesday
morning
the press room at the conference was festooned with qualified but
largely
uncritical clips from the likes of the Associated Press, USA Today,
and The New York Times. Interest snowballed. As the week progressed,
Danin found himself juggling phone interviews from all over the world
and
entertaining a steady stream of television journalists. Many tried
repeatedly
to pin Danin down to admitting that his work had authenticated the
shroud,
but he answered simply, "I am a Jewish botanist, not a theologian.
I identify images of flowers and tell their geographic origin,
not that this is Jesus or not."
The botanical congress offered so many symposia that a public
relations
firm was hired to funnel what it perceived to be newsworthy research
to the media. Standard procedure. They goofed by hyping work on an
African
bean extract with in vitro activity against Ebola virus. Seasoned
journalists
at the news briefing recalled reporting the work earlier, and finally
got the
speakers to admit that the substance faced the same 1:10,000 odds
of making it to the drugstore as any other natural product. A session
on algal
blooms was also familiar turf that oversimplified to the point of
using the
long-defunct term "blue-green algae" and committing
the taxonomic faux pas of calling them plants.
The shroud of Turin story, though, had appeal because it transcends
health and science. A closer look at the new botanical evidence,
and the radiocarbon dating that it questions, reveals the clash
between
media seeking an immediate, conclusive answer, and the slower,
much more skeptical pace of science.
Christ was buried, according to Jewish custom, before 6 p.m. on a
Friday,
three hours after he died. His body was wrapped in a shroud and
placed
in a cave guarded by large rocks. Three days later the body had
disappeared,
and the cloth somehow came to bear the life-size, full-body image of
the man.
In 30 A.D., a disciple of Jesus brought a cloth, presumably the
shroud,
to the king of Edessa (part of Turkey), where it supposedly
cured him of leprosy. Word spread, and other cities developed icons of
the
facial part of the image. The shroud survived a great flood in Edessa
in 525 A.D.,
then was taken to Constantinople in 944. Crusaders grabbed the shroud
in 1204,
and its whereabouts remained unknown until 1357, when it went on
public
display in Lirey, France. A royal family in what is now Italy
acquired
the shroud in 1453, and it began display in Turin in 1578, with a
brief
removal in 1997 due to fire.
The photographic history of the shroud of Turin begins in 1898.
That first photograph looked like a positive, and when it was
photographed,
the image of the crucified man that emerged was startling. In 1977
an enhancement of a 1931 photograph attracted the attention of Alan
Whanger,
professor emeritus at Duke University Medical Center, who is
a psychiatrist and a surgeon. Two years later a colleague of Whanger's
visiting
a sixth-century church in the Sinai desert was given a small, gold,
Byzantine coin.
"The [coin icon] was painted, the monks told him, from the shroud of
Turin,
and it had flowers," says Whanger.
Reasoning that the shroud could not have been faked in the Middle
Ages
if an icon reportedly from the sixth century resembled it,
Whanger and his wife, Mary, who works at the Council for
Study of the Shroud of Turin in Durham, N.C., developed an
optical technique to compare the coin and the image on the
shroud point by point.

3 The approach, called polarized image overlay, projects images
through polarizing filters at orthogonal angles revealing darkened
"points of congruence" that align the two objects.
The coin and the image on the shroud matched at 211 points--a much
closer correspondence than forensics use to match photographs
of faces or fingerprints, Whanger says.
But it is a chicken-and-egg argument. Couldn't a medieval artist
have copied the coin icon onto the shroud?
In 1983 another optical technique hinted that there was more to
the shroud than met the eye. German physicist Oswald Scheuerman
thought that he saw the faint outlines of flowers on a photo of the
shroud.
He used a technique called coronal imaging to track the
flow of electrical energy from a Van der Graaf generator over pieces
of plants held in front of linen, demonstrating that images of
flowers
and thorns can indeed be generated on cloth. Excited that his
optical points of congruence might be the flowers that
Scheuerman saw, Whanger became what he calls a
"late-bloomer botanist," poring over botany books, then traveling to
Israel to photograph flowers. He worked for four years, tentatively
identifying flora and attempting to publish his findings in 1989.
But Whanger's timing was off--the radiocarbon dating paper had
just appeared. "The fact that everyone thought the shroud was a fake,
and that I wasn't a botanist, combined to make the work ignored."
What Whanger needed was a botanist, and in 1995 he found Danin,
an authority on Middle Eastern flora. "He's a good scientist; he'll
look
at anything once. And in 20 seconds he said,
Those flowers are from Jerusalem,'" Whanger recalls.

Danin identified three types of plants--chrysanthemum flowers,
thorns of Gundelia tournefortii, and leaves of Zygophyllum dumosum--
whose

modern geographic ranges overlap between Jerusalem and Hebron.
Chrysanthemum is widely distributed, but Zygophyllum has a much
narrower range, with a very distinctive double leaf that falls off at
summer's end. Gundelia is a thistle that belongs to the sunflower
family, blooms between March and May, and is insect-pollinated,
indicating local origin, Danin says.
Supplementing Danin's flower identifications is a reanalysis of
pollen on the shroud by Uri Baruch from the Israel Antiquities
Authority.
The pollen samples were first collected in 1973 and in 1978 by
Max Frei, founder and director of the scientific department of the
Zurich Criminal Police. Frei obtained pollen with sticky tape,
but was familiar only with European plants, so that by the time
he died in 1983, the identifications were incomplete.
Although Danin admits that pollen analysis cannot date an
antiquity, the 313 pollen grains that Baruch scrutinized are
consistent with the species that Danin identified from
floral morphology. The group's conclusion:
The shroud hails from the region of geographic overlap.
But couldn't people have carried plants
from one place to another?
The suggested time frame is questionable too.
To support the sixth-century ballpark figure derived from
the coin icon, the researchers point to a facial cloth,
called the Sudarium of Oviedo, that was supposedly placed
directly over the face, beneath the shroud. The Persians
took this cloth through North Africa to Spain
n the eighth century. It bears dark stains in a pattern
similar to the facial likeness on the shroud, as well as
pollen from the same type of thistle. The nature of these
stains has been the focus of intense debate, with
identifications ranging from type AB human blood to paint.
Accepting the blood verdict, Danin and Whanger conclude
that the shroud must predate the eighth century, which
is the earliest time that the facial cloth's location is known.
"This pollen association, congruence of blood patterning,
and probable identical blood type suggests that the
radiocarbon dating of the shroud to only the Middle Ages
is untenable," they conclude in their paper. But again,
the facial cloth pattern could have inspired the later
image on a medieval shroud.

Danin and colleagues and others challenge the accuracy
of the radiocarbon dating. "Three labs used the same
sample from the dirtiest edge of the shroud that had been
water-stained and scorched.

This would produce a younger date," says Danin.
The shroud may also bear biological contamination,
some say. In 1993 two University of Texas at Austin
microbiologists, Stephen Mattingly and Leoncio
Garza-Valdes, described a "bioplastic layer" of
modern bacteria and fungi within the linen fibers
of the shroud, which could have thrown off the
carbon-14 date.4
But the radiocarbon dating paper is impressive.
A 10 x 70-mm piece from the shroud was cut
from a region free of char, snipped in three and
given to dating labs at the University of Arizona in
Tucson, Oxford University, and the Institute fur
Mittelenergiephysik in Zurich. Collaborators hailed
from Columbia University and the British Museum.
Controls were three samples of linen with known
dates. "The region was chosen very carefully by
textile experts to contain no material but shroud.
The shroud is a woven piece, and one region of it
is as representative of the whole as any other,"
explains Douglas Donahue, a professor of physics
at the University of Arizona who was present at the
April 21, 1988 sampling. Each lab subdivided the
samples to test them repeatedly, and treated
different pieces with different mechanical and
chemical cleaning methods. Then each sample
was examined microscopically to detect and
remove contaminants.
The results date the shroud
to 1260-1390 A.D., with 95 percent confidence.
This corresponds to the period when the shroud's
location was unknown, and is consistent with
a 14th-century bishop's report that a forger
had confessed.
Donahue defends the radiocarbon dating.
Neither water nor burn marks would alter the
date, he says, nor has Mattingly and Leoncio
Garza-Valdes' "bioplastic theory" been published
in a peer-reviewed journal. "The bacterial material
they propose is invisible to normal human beings,
including myself, is impervious to reasonable
chemical treatments, and is made of only modern
carbon. In order to change the radiocarbon
age of the shroud from the 700 years, which
we measured to 2,000 years, the shroud would
need to consist of 60 percent of this bacterial
substance."
By Thursday of the week of the botanical congress,
the story of possible new scientific evidence for the
authenticity of the shroud of Turin had made its way
around the globe. Then on Friday, August 6, the
Amherst, N.Y.-based Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP),
an international network of scientists who examine
pseudoscience, added its two cents. Their report,
compiled by CSICOP senior research fellow
Joe Nickell, claims that Frei's pollen-rich tapes could
not be replicated, and that all but one tape reexamined
after Frei's death had little pollen--and that this was an
old story. Nickell mentions other images seen
"Rorschach-like" in the shroud, attributes the
"blood" stains to tempera paint, and calls linking
the shroud to the Sudarium of Oviedo by the
pattern of marks and pollen "wishful thinking."
Danin and Whanger expected some skepticism,
and they were careful to limit any mention of dates
to "as long ago as the eighth century." Still, others
interpreted their work to mean that flowers adorned
the body when it was prepared for burial, with some
reporters likening an uneasy Danin to a messenger
from the almighty. But for many people, evidence
supporting the shroud as the burial garment of
Jesus Christ is moot. Those who believe that the image
formed as Christ rose will hardly be swayed otherwise
by radiocarbon dating, and will continue to see in the
faint flowers on the shroud what they want to see.
But from a scientific standpoint, about the only near
certainty regarding the new view of the shroud of Turin
is that it is likely to turn up as an episode of The X-Files.

Ricki Lewis ) is a contributing
editor for The Scientist.

· A. Danin et al., Flora of the Shroud of Turin,
Missouri Botanical Garden Press, 1999.

· P.E. Damno et al., "Radiocarbon dating of the
shroud of Turin," Nature, 337:611-5, 1989.

· A.D. Whanger and M.W. Whanger,
"Polarized image overlay technique: a new
image comparison method and its applications,"
Applied Optics, 24:766-72, 1985.

· L. Garza-Valdes et al., "A problematic
source of organic contaminant of linen,"
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in
Physics Research, Section B:504-7,
Amsterdam, ier, 1997.

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