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 be...

Extant Neotropical rainforests are well known for their remarkable diversity of fruit and seed types. Biotic agents disperse most of these disseminules, whereas wind dispersal is less common. Although wind-dispersed fruits and seeds are greatly overshadowed in closed rainforests, many important families in the Neotropics (e.g., Bignoniaceae, Fabaceae, Malvaceae, Orchidaceae, Sapindaceae) show n...

Members of the plant genus Selaginella (de Beauvois 1805) have few known insect herbivores even though they are considered by some to be 'living fossils', with extant taxa virtually indistinguishable from 300 Mya fossils. Butterflies are well-known herbivores, and the satyrs are among the most speciose of them despite having radiated ∼ 35 Mya ago. Nearly all satyrs feed on grass or sedges, but ...

rhaetian strata from the nayband formation of the tabas block, east- central iran, were studied palynologically. the materialexamined contained moderately diverse and well-preserved dinoflagellate cyst assemblages which lead to the identification ofrhaetogonyaulax rhaetica zone. the assigned age of this dinozone (rhaetian) is justified by plant fossils such as equisetitesarenaceus, scytophyllum...

The Trout Valley Formation of Emsian–Eifelian age in northern Maine hosts evidence of early vascular plant communities interpreted as having colonized wetland, estuarine environments. To date, collections made under permits issued by the Baxter State Park Commission, originate from outcrop along Trout Brook, its tributaries, and poorly exposed lithologies inside the woodlands. Construction of a...

-Macerations of fragmented plant compressions of Silurian (Llandoverian) age yield sheets of organic material bearing ridges and depressions (interpreted as corresponding to surficial dimensions of cells), fragments of smooth walled tubular elements, and fragments of tubular elements with differentially thickened walls ("banded tubes"). A fragment of tissue (1.2 mOl long), consisting of smooth ...

The problem of missing data is often considered to be the most important obstacle in reconstructing the phylogeny of fossil taxa and in combining data from diverse characters and taxa for phylogenetic analysis. Empirical and theoretical studies show that including highly incomplete taxa can lead to multiple equally parsimonious trees, poorly resolved consensus trees, and decreased phylogenetic ...