Woody or not woody? Evidence for early angiosperm habit from the Early Cretaceous fossil wood record of Europe
✍ Scribed by Marc Philippe; Bernard Gomez; Vincent Girard; Clément Coiffard; Véronique Daviero-Gomez; Frédéric Thevenard; Jean-Paul Billon-Bruyat; Myette Guiomar; Jean-Louis Latil; Jean Le loeuff; Didier Néraudeau; Davide Olivero; Jan Schlögl
- Book ID
- 103878207
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2008
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 758 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1871-174X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The important question of early angiosperm growth habit (i.e., trees, shrubs or herbs?) remains unanswered. Various theories have been based on data from both living and fossil plants. The Early Cretaceous fossil wood record, however, was seldom used to investigate early angiosperm habit. We set up a database for the Early Cretaceous and Cenomanian of Europe, as this area has the most complete and stratigraphically well-constrained record. The database has 170 entries, based on a bibliographical survey and on the examination of more than 600 new fossil wood specimens from a wide range of palaeoenvironments. In our record the woody characteristic in angiosperms appeared during the Albian, whereas most of the angiosperm's early evolution took place earlier, during the earliest Cretaceous. From the European fossil wood record for the Early Cretaceous and Cenomanian, the global extension and dominance of angiosperms in the Cenomanian is concomitant with a sharp increase in heteroxylous wood diversity. It appears that small stature and weak wood limited the angiosperm ecological radiation for some time.