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).

! J. Sremac et al. (2024): Marine microfossils: Tiny archives of ocean changes through deep time. Free access, AIMS Microbiology, 10: 644�673. DOI: 10.3934/microbiol.2024030.
Note figure 15: The summary of the applications of microfossils in biostratigraphy, paleoecology and the study of raw materials.
"... The most common marine fossil groups studied by micropaleontologists are cyanobacteria, coccolithophores, dinoflagellates, diatoms, silicoflagellates, radiolarians, foraminifers, red and green algae, ostracods, and pteropods
[...] By studying microfossils, paleontologists depict the age of the rock and identify depositional environments ..."

! I.J. Glasspool and R.A. Gastaldo (2024): Through fire, and through water, an abundance of Mid-Devonian charcoal. Open access, Palaios, 39: 301�322.
Note figure 15: Uncalibrated and luminosity modified, oil immersion, reflected light images of Trout Valley mesofossil; see especially figure E:
! The internal anatomy of a hooked-appendage shaft showing cell-wall lamination and separation, and with many cells show brittle fracture bogen structures.
"... Charcoalified mesofossils recovered from the Emsian�Eifelian Trout Valley and St. Froid Lake formations of Maine are direct evidence of wildfires
[...] we provide a reconstruction of this Middle Devonian landscape and its flora in which lightning generated by post-dry season storms ignited wildfires that propagated through an extensive psilophyte-dominated litter ..."

! J. Bevendorff et al. (2024): Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines European Conference on Information Retrieval. See likewise here.
"... Many users of web search engines have been complaining in recent years about the supposedly decreasing quality of search results
[...] We monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries. Our findings suggest that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content ..."
Also worth checking out:
It's not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse. A new study by German researchers found that Google Search is plagued with SEO spam.
By Meera Navlakha, Mashable, January 18, 2024.

Dorik (an all-in-one website building platform):
25+ Best Google Alternative Search Engines to Use in 2024. Looking for an alternative search engine to Google? Here are the 26 best alternative search engines you can use instead of Google.
By Zaki Rezwana Chowdhury, September 2024.

N.G. Beckman and L.L. Sullivan (2023): The Causes and Consequences of Seed Dispersal. Free access, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 54: 403-427.
"... Seed dispersal, or the movement of diaspores away from the parent location, is a multiscale, multipartner process that depends on the interaction of plant life history with vector movement and the environment
[...] We provide an overview of the ultimate causes of dispersal and the consequences of this important process for plant population and community dynamics ..."

Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.
The Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, published since 1970, covers significant developments in the fields of ecology, evolutionary biology, and systematics, as they apply to all life on Earth.

N.J. Tabor and T.S. Myers (2015): Paleosols as Indicators of Paleoenvironment and Paleoclimate. In PDF, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 43.
See here as well.
"... Soils form in response to interactions among the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere, so paleosols potentially record physical, biological, and chemical information about past conditions near Earth's surface. As a result, paleosols are an important resource for terrestrial environmental and climatic reconstructions ..."

G.S. Weissmann et al. (2013): Prograding distributive fluvial systems�geomorphic models and ancient examples. In PDF, SEPM Spec. Publ., 104: 131�48.
See here as well.
"... Recent work indicates that most modern continental sedimentary basins are filled primarily by distributive fluvial systems (DFS). In this article we use depositional environment interpretations observed on Landsat imagery of DFS to infer the vertical succession of channel and overbank facies, including paleosols, from a hypothetical prograding DFS ..."

John Southard (2007), MIT Open Learning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
! Sedimentary Geology. The course combines aspects of aspects of modern sediments and ancient sedimentary rocks, textures of siliciclastic sediments and sedimentary rocks, particle size, particle shape, and particle packing. Mechanics of sediment transport. Survey of siliciclastic sedimentary rocks: sandstones, conglomerates, and shales. Carbonate sediments and sedimentary rocks; cherts; evaporites. Siliciclastic and carbonate diagenesis. Paleontology, with special reference to fossils in sedimentary rocks. Modern and ancient depositional environments. Stratigraphy. Sedimentary basins. Fossil fuels: coal, petroleum.
See here as well.

! A.J. Hetherington (2024): Fossil evidence supports at least two origins of plant roots. PDF file, pp. 3-18, in: T. Beeckman & A. Eshel (eds.), Plant Roots: The Hidden Half. Fifth edn, CRC Press, Boca Raton.
See likewise here.
Note figure 1.4: Geological timeline showing major events in early land plant evolution.
! Figure 1.8, A: Complex rooting system of Asteroxylon mackiei composed of root-bearing axes and rooting axes. A, Artists reconstruction of A. mackiei in life.

R.A. Gastaldo et al. (2024): To rush into the secret house of death: The fate of a Tournaisian plant Geology, 20.
"... Tournaisian-age failure of marginal lacustrine sediments, and their bulk collapse into an inland rift-basin lake in the Moncton Subbasin, Canada, led to the entrainment of rare, almost complete, three-dimensionally preserved non-woody trees. Preservation of these unique fossils from the Albert Formation was a consequence of contemporaneous seismicity ..."

! Y. Xing et al. (2016): Testing the biases in the rich Cenozoic angiosperm macrofossil record. In PDF, International Journal of Plant Sciences, 117: 371-388. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/685388.
See likewise here.
"... The data presented here include 2478 assemblages from all Cenozoic epochs and 1961 sites from all continents, as well as representatives of 221 families (of 445 recognized) and 1859 genera, and show that the Cenozoic angiosperm macrofossil record is extraordinarily rich. However, this rich record is temporally, spatially, and phylogenetically biased: the Miocene is much better sampled than the rest of Cenozoic, the Northern Hemisphere is better sampled than the Southern Hemisphere ..."

! C. Yu et al. (2024): Artificial intelligence in paleontology. Open access, Earth-Science Reviews, 252.
"... The accumulation of large datasets and increasing data availability have led to the emergence of data-driven paleontological studies, which reveal an unprecedented picture of evolutionary history
[...] studies feature a wide range of techniques such as Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS), neural networks, transfer learning, and many other machine learning methods to automate a variety of paleontological research workflows ..."

S.A. Smith and J.M. Beaulieu (2024): Ad fontes: divergence-time estimation and the age of angiosperms. Open access, New Phytologist.
"... When our results present a dramatically different view of life's history, such as in the case of plant life, it may be more reasonable to consider errors in our model or interpretation than to dismiss conflicting data outright. Like the iconoclasm of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, simplifying analyses and focusing on underlying biology may lead to a clearer understanding of the evidence ..."

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 10: 216-217.
August von Gutbier (1798-1866). In German.

Y.L. Qiu and B.D. Mishler (2024): Relationships Among the Bryophytes and Vascular Plants: A Case Study in Deep-Time Reconstruction. Open access, Diversity, 16. https://doi.org/10.3390/d16070426.
"... A tentative consensus, reached ten years ago, suggested that bryophytes are a paraphyletic group, with liverworts being sister to all other land plants and hornworts being sister to vascular plants
[...] A discussion is presented here on strengths and weaknesses of different types of characters (morphological traits, nucleotide sequences, and genome structural arrangements) and their suitability for resolving deep phylogenetic relationships ..."

C.C. Labandeira and R. Cenci (2024): Workshop: Insect-Plant Interaction Notes. In PDF, Conference: Ichnia 2024 - The 5^th International Congress on Ichnology, Florianópolis, Brazil.

! A.C. Scott (2024): The Anatomically preserved Early Carboniferous flora of Pettycur, Fife, Scotland. Open access, Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 135: 389�415.
"... At least 25 plant organ species are present representing more than 13 whole plant species
[...] It is shown also that a number of the plants may also be preserved as charcoal
[...] Of particular importance is the occurrence of true permineralised peats that provide evidence of the botanical composition of the earliest peat-forming mire at a time of rapid global change ..."

J. Smerdon et al. (2023): The historical development of large-scale paleoclimate field reconstructions over the Common Era. Open access, Reviews of Geophysics, 61. e2022RG000782. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022RG000782-
"... annually-resolved climate proxies, such as tree rings, ice cores, and corals, when used in concert with observational records, can provide information on how climate conditions have changed over decades to millennia. These proxies are also abundant enough over the last two millennia to create reconstructions in both space and time, or maps of climate conditions at seasonal or annual intervals. These kinds of reconstructions are called climate field reconstructions (CFRs) and we review their scientific history back to the 1970s when they were first attempted ..."