Fossil wood is one of the most common types of plant fossils and often preserves fine features of the tissue (e.g., growth-ring boundaries) and of the individual cells themselves (wall thickness, ornamentation, etc.). Fossil wood provides information on the systematic affinities of extinct plants but also on their physiology and on the environmenta...
The earliest Carboniferous (ca 360-330 million years ago) is a pivotal time in plant evolution, with the transition between taxa that characterized the first complex plant communities during the middle to late Devonian and more modern groups that later became major elements of the iconic coal swamps vegetation of the Late Carboniferous. However, lo...
The Malvaceae is a family of flowering plants that consists of 244 genera and 4,225 species. This family is found on all vegetated continents and exhibits substantial morphological and habitat diversity. The fossil record has been abundant since the Cretaceous period, but many fossils, especially pollen and leaf remain, are ambiguous. As a result, ...
Background and Aims: The complexity of fossil forest ecosystems is difficult to reconstruct due to the fragmentary nature of the fossil record. However, detailed morpho-anatomical studies of well-preserved individual fossils can provide key information on tree growth and ecology, including in biomes with no modern analog such as the lush forests th...
The fossil record of the diverse subfamily Passifloroideae (>750 species and 17 genera) is relatively poor. Despite the distinctiveness of its leaves (glandular and often emarginate), most of the fossils from this group have been described from seeds. Fossil seeds have been recovered from Europe, and North and South America. A lack of information o...
Aerenchyma is a specialized plant tissue containing enlarged gas spaces formed either by differential growth and cell separation (schizogeny) or by cell death (lysigeny). Today, aerenchyma is formed constitutively in the roots, shoots, and leaves of aquatic plants, and in response to poor soil aeration in wetland plants. Its presence can thus be us...
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The cladoxylopsids s.l. are an extinct group famous for including some of the species that formed the first forests during the Middle Devonian. The group encompasses several arborescent taxa for which different architectural models have been proposed in the literature. However, all these models have focused on tree-sized cladoxylopsids (i.e., Pietz...
Documenting a wide paleogeographic range of Famennian (latest Devonian) floras is essential to better understand the state of land plant diversity between the Kellwasser and the Hangenberg bio-events, two first-order global crises for the marine biota but whose impact on terrestrial organisms needs to be clarified.There are few well-documented plan...
The Paris Basin is one of the most important sedimentary basins in France. This sedimentary basin is considered the birthplace of stratigraphy and comparative anatomy, but it also witnessed the emergence of paleobotany in France. The first study of fossil flora comes from the work of Adolphe Brongniart (1801-1876). In 1828, he outlined three resear...
