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).

C.G. De Francesco et al. (2025): The rise of Actualistic Taphonomy in South America. In PDF, Publicación Electrónica de la Asociación Paleontológica Argentina. In PDF, See here as well.
"... Over the past four decades, global actualistic taphonomy studies have grown significantly
[...] This review underscores the significant progress made in South American actualistic taphonomy but also points to underrepresented environments and taxonomic groups ..."

A. Aisch et al. (2025): Palaeo-bioinspiration draws on the fossil record to advance innovation. Open access, communications biology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-08043-6. See likewise here (in PDF).
"... Bioinspiration is an approach to innovation based on the observation of biological systems
[...] Expanding the scope of bioinspiration to the fossil record greatly increases the diversity of potential biological �muses� and provides a means to understand the form, function and origins of current living systems ..."

J. Barabach (2025): Has Quaternary palynology reached its climax? Open access, The Holocene, 35. https://doi.org/10.1177/09596836251332807.
Note figure 7: Mean Total Citation per Article (MeanTCperArt). Significant decline in citations in last years.
Figure 13: Annual scientific production of documents containing the following keywords: �palaeoecology�, �pollen analysis�, �climate reconstruction�, �vegetation history� and �palaeobotany�. Only �climate reconstruction� shows an upward trend.
"... Bibliometric analysis allows to distinguish different phases in the evolution of palynology.
[...] the scientometric analysis of palynological documents suggests that in the second decade of the 20th century, the increasing trend of the number of published documents stopped ..."

A. Molina-Solís et al. (2025): About the diversification and heyday of Palaeophytic flora: new data and perspectives. Abstract, Historical Biology. https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2025.2571750. See here as well.
Note figure 1: Approximate palaeogeographical distribution (dashed line) of four main phytochoria, and climatic zones (dotted line).
"... A new compilation of late Palaeozoic plant families has been analysed
[...] The results reveal the major vegetation changes in Mississippian to Guadalupian times, including the Palaeophytic�Mesophytic flora transition. Palaeophytic vegetation was globally dominated by lycopsids and filicopsids, but these groups underwent high extinction rates
[...] global diversities were maintained by increased origination rates with the expansion of the replacing Mesophytic vegetation ..."

Historical Biology Taylor & Francis).
This international journal of paleobiology publishes papers on developments in the sciences concerning the history of life through geological time and the biology of past organisms.

! S. McLoughlin (2022): The history of palaeobotanical research at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm. In PDF. Retrieved from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
"... The Palaeobotany Department of the Swedish Museum of Natural History was established in the late 1800s
[...] Now under the management of just its sixth administrative Head since 1884, the department is forging new pathways in palaeobotanical research utilizing cutting-edge technologies to provide advances in plant systematics, phylogeny, biogeography, biostratigraphy, palaeoenvironmental analysis, plant-animal interactions, and fossil fungal/microbial studies ..."

H. Nguyen et al. (2025): Integrating Plant Fossil Proxies and Biomarkers to Reconstruct Deep-Time Paleoclimate. In PDF, Scientific Research Journal of Biology and Life Science, 3.
"... By bridging fossil morphology with organic geochemical signatures, we provide a comprehensive framework for analyzing climate fluctuations, vegetation dynamics, and biotic responses to major global events across Earth history. We emphasize methodological innovations ..."

! B. Adroit et al. (2025): Litter leaves misrepresent plant�insect interactions in standing vegetation. Free access, Front. Ecol. Evol., 13: 1549315. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2025.1549315.
"... We observed variations in insect damage on litter leaves compared to those on trees, with some localities showing reduced damage richness
[...] Our study builds upon existing methods in paleoecology, highlighting their value in detecting environmental signals ..."

! A.M.F. Tomescu and C. Whitewoods (2024): Development on the rocks: integrating molecular biology and the fossil record to reconstruct the evolution of leaf development. Abstract, Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, 64.
"... Leaves, encountered in the majority of modern tracheophytes, evolved multiple times independently in several lineages
[...] We show that lycopsid leaves likely evolved once, and earlier, than euphyllophyte leaves, and that euphyllophyte leaves all evolved from lateral branching systems ..."

L.H. Liow and T.B. Quental (2025): Biotic interactions and their consequences for macroevolution: learning from the fossil record and beyond. Free access, Paleobiology 51, 71�82.
"... Every animal and plant interacts with many other individuals, including disease-causing organisms, prey items, or pollinators, throughout their lives. These interactions necessarily contribute to the ecological and evolutionary processes
[...] We discuss how paleobiologists have studied biotic interactions in the last 50 years ..."

! B. Becker-Kerber et al. (2025): The rise of lichens during the colonization of terrestrial environments. Free access, Science Advances, 11.
Note figure 7: Artistic reconstruction of Spongiophyton during the Early Devonian in the high latitude depositional system of the Paraná Basin.
"... We demonstrate that the enigmatic Devonian fossil Spongiophyton from Brazil captures one of the earliest and most widespread records of lichens
[...] Spongiophyton abundance and wide paleogeographic distribution in Devonian successions reveal an ecologically prominent presence of lichens during the late stages of terrestrial colonization, just before the evolution of complex forest ecosystems ..."

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 ..."

! 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.
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