Links for Palaeobotanists 1

An annotated collection of pointers to information on palaeobotany
or to WWW resources which may be of use to palaeobotanists (with an Upper Triassic bias).

A. Molina-Solís et al. (2025): About the diversification and heyday of Palaeophytic flora: new data and perspectives. Abstract, Historical Biology. See here as well.
"The results reveal the major vegetation changes in Mississippian to Guadalupian times, including the Palaeophytic�Mesophytic flora transition
[...] No relationship is seen between the balance of global origination�extinction rates and major ecological changes, such as the growth and decline of the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age, or the collapse of the palaeotropical coal swamp biome ..."

! J. Schiffbauer et al. (2025): 283,821 concretions, how do you measure the Mazon Creek? Assessing the paleoenvironmental and taphonomic nature of the Braidwood and Essex assemblages. Free access, Paleobiology 51, 488�506. https://doi.org/10.1017/pab.2025.10045
! Note figure 14: Taphonomic model of Mazon preservation.
Figure 15: X-ray tomographic data of Mazon fossil concretions showing light image, 2D slice image, and 3D renders of internal pyritization in both side and oblique profiles.
"... we revisit the paleoecology of the Mazon Creek biota by analyzing data from nearly 300,000 concretions
[] These new insights also allow a refined taphonomic model, wherein recalcitrant tissues of Braidwood organisms were subject to rapid burial rates, while organisms of the Essex assemblage typically had more labile tissues and were subject to slower burial rates ..."

American Geosciences Institute (AGI), Alexandria, Virginia.
AGI is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to serving the geoscience community and addressing the needs of society. Go to:
! Geologic Guidebooks of North America Database.
Consists of references to geologic field trip guidebooks of North America (United States, Canada, Mexico). Most of the guidebooks cited are from the period 1940 to the present. A few are from earlier years.

A.S. Merdith et al. (2025): Phanerozoic icehouse climates as the result of multiple solid-Earth cooling mechanisms. Free access, Science Advances, 11.
"... The Phanerozoic climate has been interrupted by two long �icehouse� intervals, including the current icehouse of the last ~34 million years.
[...] Our results indicate that recent icehouse climates required a combination of different cooling mechanisms acting simultaneously and were not driven by a single known process ..."

D.L. Royer et al. (2004): CO₂ as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate. In PDF, GSA Today, 14: 1052-5173. See also here.
Note figure 1: Details of CO₂ proxy data set.
! Figure 2: CO₂ and climate.
"... Here we review the geologic records of CO₂ and glaciations and find that CO₂ was low (<500 ppm) during periods of long-lived and widespread continental glaciations and high (>1000 ppm) during other, warmer periods ..."

! W. Ding et al. (2025): The stepwise rise of angiosperm-dominated terrestrial ecosystems. Open access, Biol. Rev., 100: 2131�2149. doi: 10.1111/brv.70039.
! Note figure 1: Stepwise evolution of angiosperms and angiosperm-dominated biomes in Earth history during the Cretaceous and Cenozoic.
"... we summarize, based on fossils and molecular evidence, when and how angiosperms came to diversify, dominate, and shape terrestrial ecosystems
[...] We highlight five major phases of angiosperm evolution that took place against a background of palaeogeography and climate changes ..."

M. Shukla et al. (2024): A Comparative Study of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Free access, International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer Science and Technology, 12: 2347-5552. https://doi.org/10.55524/ijircst.2024.12.4.2.
"... This research work presents comparatively analysis of the three Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool, namely ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity AI, based on the content generation, ownership and developing technology, context understanding, transparency, and information retrieval ..."

F.R. Blattmann et al. (2025): Wildfire, ecosystem, and climate interactions in the Early Triassic. Free access, Communications Earth & Environment
See here as well (in PDF).
"... we explore wildfire during the Early Triassic (Smithian and Spathian, ca. 250 million years ago) � a time interval characterized by scarce fire evidence, perturbation of the carbon cycle, climatic oscillations, vegetation succession and biotic radiationextinction pulses � using polyaromatic hydrocarbons, which are an organic (geo)chemical fire indicator in sediments ..."

! M.P. D'Antonio (2025): Convergent evolution of the developmental anatomy of leaf abscission: evidence from the arboreous lycopsid Sigillaria. Free access, Annals of Botany. ttps://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcaf188.
"... we investigate using microscopy permineralized leaf cushions of the arboreous lycopsid Sigillaria approximata with and without articulated leaves
[...] Despite the similarities between leaf abscission in Lepidodendrales and leaf abscission in extant euphyllophytes, these represent distantly related plant groups separated in time by 300 million years ..."

ScienceDirect:
Paleobotany.
This website is created by ScienceDirect using heuristic and machine-learning approaches to extract relevant information.

! H. Sanei et al. (2024): Assessing biochar's permanence: An inertinite benchmark. Free access, International Journal of Coal Geology, 281.
"... This study applies the well-established optical and compositional characteristics of inertinite maceral, long defined by organic petrology and geochemistry disciplines, as a benchmark of the geological permanence for biochar. The well-calibrated and standardized tools commonly used by geologists for quantifying the level of organic carbon evolution have been re-introduced as new methods for measuring the degree of carbonization with respect to the inertinite benchmark ..."

V.A. Korasidis and B.E. Wagstaff (2025): Cool-temperate riparian floras in the Early Cretaceous rift valley of Victoria, Australia. Open access, Alcheringa. https://doi.org/10.1080/03115518.2025.2489614.
Note figure 14: Reconstruction of cool-temperate rainforest and fluvial environments in southeast Australian during the late Albian.
"... we studied 291 palynological samples from 48 sites in the Otway and Gippsland basins. Podocarpaceae represent the major component of the open canopy forests ..."

! J.W. Clark and P.C.J. Donoghue (2025): Uncertainty in the timing of diversification of flowering plants rests with equivocal interpretation of their fossil record. R. Soc. Open Sci., 12: 242158. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.242158. See likewise here.
"... We show that the disagreement between molecular and palaeobotanical estimates is an artefact of interpretations of the fossil record
[...] Attention should be refocused on the history of stem-angiosperms in which the body plan of this most successful lineage of land plants was assembled ...

D. Quiroz-Cabascango et al. (2025): Earliest Jurassic plant assemblages from Sweden reveal a low-diversity ginkgoalean and cheirolepid flora dominating the post-extinction landscape. Free access, Annals of Botany. https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcaf143.
Note figure 9A: Centimetre-scale charcoalified wood fragments in feldspathic sandstone.
"The low-diversity post-extinction recovery forests of the earliest Jurassic were dominated by ginkgoopsids, cheirolepid conifers and ferns, growing under seasonal mesothermal conditions. Dispersed charcoal indicates wildfires were present in the landscape at this time ..."

S. Pla-Pueyo and E.H. Gierlowski-Kordesch (2025): Wetlands as environments of early human occupation: A new classification for freshwater palaeowetlands. Open access, The Depositional Record. DOI: 10.1002/dep2.327.
"... A new classification for inland freshwater palaeowetlands, with a focus on carbonate wetlands, is proposed here, recognising key features that an be preserved in the fossil record ..."

D.M. Njoroge et al. (2025): The effects of invertebrates on wood decomposition across the world. In PDF, Biological Reviews, 100: 158-171. https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.13134.
See likewise here.
"... we investigated what drives the invertebrate effect on wood decomposition worldwide. Globally, we found wood decomposition rates were on average approximately 40% higher when invertebrates were present compared to when they were excluded. This effect was most pronounced in the tropics, owing mainly to the activities of termites ..."

! S. Magallón et al. (2025): A metacalibrated time-tree documents the early rise of flowering plant phylogenetic diversity. Free access, New Phytologist, 207: 249-479.
Note figure 1: Molecular and fossil-based estimates of angiosperm age.
"... A large number of fossil-derived calibrations and a confidence interval on angiosperm age have been combined in relaxed clock analyses to provide a time-frame of angiosperm evolution. The maximum age of the onset of diversification of angiosperms into their living diversity has been calculated with high confidence to lie in the Early Cretaceous ..."