Adaptive role of leaf habit in extinct polar forests

When the bodies of Scott and his polar party were found in 1913, a precious cargo of plant fossils from the Beardmore Glacier was discovered with their sledge. Later examination by the Cambridge palaeobotanist Albert Seward showed these to be the 250 million-year-old Permian remains of Glossopteris, an early gymnosperm already known from India, Australia and South Africa. This finding was to become an important piece in the jigsaw of evidence for Alfred Wegener’s 1915 theory of ‘continental drift’, supporting the existence of Gondwanaland, a giant southern continent long since broken into pieces by movement of the Earth’s crust. Sadly, the scientific world of 1915 was not yet ready for Wegener’s radical ideas and, in the absence of a plausible mechanism for continental movement, it was forgotten until the 1950s when mounting evidence for plate tectonics revolutionised our view of the Earth. But the significance of Scott’s fossils did not end there. For in his 1914 report on the plant remains, Seward makes an important recognition; that ancient Glossopteris forests on Antarctica may have grown in an environment unlike Adaptive role of leaf habit in extinct polar forests