#palaeobotany

"Patsage Antediluvien - Une foret de l'epoque Carbonifere" ["Antediluvian Landscape - A Carboniferous Period Forest"] from Camille Flammarion's Le monde avant la création de l'homme (1886)

Paleontologists have identified the 410-million-year-old specimens of Spongiophyton nanum from the Ponta Grossa Formation in the Paraná Basin of Brazil as one of the oldest and most widespread lichens from the fossil record. ... The earliest evidence of ancient land plants occurs as cryptospores by the Middle Ordovician (460 million years ago), while macrofossils of early vascular plants appear in Silurian deposits (443 to 420 million years ago). However, the role and presence of lichens during certain steps of the terrestrialization process remain unclear. “Spongiophyton nanum shows a similar combination of fungi and algae to modern lichens,” said Dr. Bruno Becker-Kerber from Harvard University. “Our findings show that lichens were not marginal organisms, but key pioneers in the transformation of Earth’s surface.” “They helped create the soil that allowed plants and animals to take hold and diversify on land.” ...

Morphology and internal structures of Spongiophyton nanum. Image credit: Becker-Kerber et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adw7879.

Name: Elei Fafie

Pronouns: She/Her

Order Represented: Bennettitales

Age: Kungurian, Early Permian

Height: 6 centimetres

Eye colour: Dark Green

Magical Proclivity: Water, Wind

Spells: Chalaza Afa, Synangia Fa'afilemu, Interseminal Galu, Ramentum Asiosio

An outgoing and dutiful woman who serves with Sirichai's crew. She's adventurous, straight-talking and short-tempered. Although she isn't related to Kai Namele, she looks remarkably like him, with many assuming at first glance that they're twins. She personally finds the assertion that they look alike irritating and is quick to correct it.

Like Kai, her tresses and wings are made up of tough, spiny foliage, and her crown is a pair of tough cones. They are rounded, colourful and more ornate than his, almost like compact inflorescences. She enjoys weaving and usually wears a skirt made from dry leaves, repurposed after they have been shed by her wings.

Sigillaria – Late Devonian-Late Permian (383-254 Ma)

I know I’ve faked you out before, but today’s animal really isn’t an animal. It’s our very first venture into paleobotany, in the form of a plant named Sigillaria. For those who don’t know much about prehistoric plants (including myself before researching this), the idea of talking about a fossil plant might sound boring, but I promise, there are a lot of interesting things to know about plants, especially plants from the Paleozoic Era.

One of the most important landmarks in the Paleozoic was the invasion of land. For the first 100 million years of the Phanerozoic Eon, life was found only in the water. The land was completely devoid of life, the atmosphere barren and inhospitable. Plants were the first organisms to come ashore, and, while there’s a lot to talk about there, that’s a tangent for another genus. The main idea here is that plants got on land first, and plants are hardy sons of bitches. You can find plants almost anywhere. I work at a farm supply store, and we have torn bags of mulch with plants growing out of them. They aren’t particularly picky. This is pretty evident in the fossil record, where plants arrived on land and almost immediately diversified and conquered it all. Animals took much longer to catch up. By the time vertebrates were first starting to flop onto the shores of lakes, terrestrial plants were huge. It would be a long time before large herbivores would evolve, and in the meantime, those huge plants covered the surface of the earth, leading to the humid, global rainforests of the Carboniferous period. These rainforests looked quite different from the ones we know today. Sigillaria was one of the plants that made up this alien blanket of vegetation, and it shows up quite a lot in the fossil record.

This may look like a tree, but it’s actually a lycopod, placing it closer to club mosses and quillworts. It wasn’t woody, either, instead supported by jury-rigged leaf bases right under the surface of its trunk. Those leaf bases left imprints on the trunk and resulted in the pattern on the surface, which was different from species to species. Most Sigillaria specimens have only one branch of leaves. Forked trunks are pretty rare, but I drew one with a fork because it’s neat.

Sigillaria reproduced with spores, like ferns. Spore-bearing plants can only live in humid environments, but since the Carboniferous was pretty much a big sauna, this wasn’t much a problem. It was found mostly in floodplains or swamps As those biomes shrank, Sigillaria’s presence in the fossil record dwindled more and more, before finally disappearing during the Permian-Triassic extinction event. The more late Paleozoic animals I cover, the more the Great Dying is put into perspective. So many groups of animals and plants were lost that there’s almost no overlap in biota between Permian and Triassic rocks.

That being said, Sigillaria was a hanger-on from the Carboniferous. Big lycopods were a diverse group back then, but towards the end of the period, the earth grew colder. The earth became drier and the global rainforests started to shrink. This event is called, fittingly enough, the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse. It wasn’t a large enough extinction event to be one of the big ones, but it caused changes that affected everything on earth. Swamps were hit the hardest, but since Sigillaria wasn’t exclusively a swamp-dweller like most of its cousins, it was able to hang on until things got really hard. That rainforest collapse was a huge part of why we have so much coal today, by the way. Places like Pennsylvania that have a whole bunch of coal also have a whole bunch of Caboniferous fossils.

Hello! I’ve restarted my science tumblr, and now it reflects my current interest in palaobotany. Here, have an Aculea bifida that I collected in a fieldwork to the Rintoul Creek Formation. It’s a beautifully elegant fern from the early Cretaceous, and this specimen is dated to the Neocomian stage (145.5mya - 130mya)

"Les premiers arbres - Groupe de calamites" ["The first trees - group of Calamites"] from Camille Flammarion's Le monde avant la création de l'homme (1886)