Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

Morten St George:
"...the answer is not to deny the VMS depictions of a New World rainforest (for which the evidence is overwhelming),"

Each ecosystem adapts itself in a specific way and when you get really good at knowing plants, you can glance at an unfamiliar group of plants and, with a fairly good degree of certainty, guess the kind of ecology (sometimes even the specific area) from where they come. Alpine and northern plants are distinct from Mediterranean plants in many ways.
This also holds true for isolated gene pools.
I spent many months studying the VMS plants before I started IDing them. The overall morphology of those plants is not New World rainforest plants.