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Anyone who has taken a long road trip or bike ride has used a product of the spurge plant family — rubber. The spurge family, or Euphorbiaceae, includes economically valuable plants like the rubber tree, castor oil plant, poinsettia and cassava. Newly identified fossils found in Argentina suggest that a group of spurges took a trip of their own tens of millions of years ago. Driven by climatic changes and land movements over millennia, a group of spurges relocated thousands of miles from ancient South America to Australia, Asia and parts of Africa, according to research led by Penn State.
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