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).

! S.S. Renner and D.D. Sokoloff (2024): The sexual lability hypothesis for the origin of the land plant generation cycle. Open access, Current Biology, 34.
Note figure 1: Traits relevant to the evolution of the land plant sporophyte plotted on a phylogenetic scaffold.
Figure 2: The evolution of the sporophyte under the antithetic and homologous hypotheses.
Figure 4: The sexual lability hypothesis.

A.L. Decombeix et al. (2023): Fossil evidence of tylosis formation in Late Devonian plants. In PDF, Nature Plants, 9.
See likewise here.
"... Tyloses are swellings of parenchyma cells into adjacent water-conducting cells that develop in vascular plants as part of heartwood formation or specifically in response to embolism and pathogen infection. Here we document tyloses in Late Devonian (approximately 360 Myr ago) Callixylon wood ..."

A. Watkins (2024): Paleoclimate Proxies and the Benefits of Disunity. In PDF, Philosophy of Science. doi:10.1017/psa.2024.12.
See here as well.
Note figure 1: Global temperature reconstruction.
"... I describe two proxy data and measurement practices, regarding proxy calibration and proxy data infrastructure. I document how at least some data and measurement practices in paleoclimatology are disunified
[...] I argue that, perhaps counterintuitively, this lack of standardization and unification of proxy data and measurements has several benefits ..."

! S. Dierickx et al. (2024): Non-destructive wood identification using X-ray µCT scanning: which resolution do we need? Open access, Plant Methods, 20. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13007-024-01216-0. Note likewise here (in PDF).
"... There is, however, no standardized approach that determines the required resolution for proper wood identification using X-ray µCT. Here we compared X-ray µCT scans of 17 African wood species at four resolutions
[...] The results show the potential of X-ray µCT for non-destructive wood identification.
[...] The dataset of 17 scanned species is made available online and serves as the first step towards a reference database of scanned wood species ..."

E.J.T. Loewen et al. (2024): New Canadian amber deposit fills gap in fossil record near end-Cretaceous mass extinction. In PDF, Current Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.03.001. See here as well.
"... we report a diverse amber assemblage from the Late Cretaceous (67.04 ± 0.16 Ma) of the Big Muddy Badlands, Canada. The new deposit fills a critical 16-million-year gap in the arthropod fossil record
Amber chemistry and stable isotopes suggest the amber was produced by coniferous (Cupressaceae) trees in a subtropical swamp ..."

X.-D. Gou and Z. Feng (2024): Checklist of the Triassic wood (updated June 2024). Free access, Mesozoic, 1: 173-185.
"... The list contains 50 genera and 130 species of gymnospermous wood taxa documented from 16 countries across seven continents.
[...] Taxonomically, 7 genera and 8 species were documented from the Lower Triassic, 7 genera and 8 species from the Middle Triassic, and 37 genera and 98 species from the Upper Triassic ..."

! M.A.K. Lalica (2024): Evolutionary origins of secondary growth-the periderm perspective: Integrating evidence from fossils and living plants. Free access, Thesis, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.
Note figure 7: A model for the developmental sequence of wound-response periderm in early euphyllophytes.
Figure 15: Wound periderm in fossil plants.
"... Knowledge of periderm occurrences in the fossil record and living lineages outside the seed plants is limited and its evolutionary origins remain poorly explored
[...] I add new observations and experiments on living plant lineages and new occurrences from the fossil record. One of the latter, documented in the new early euphyllophyte species Nebuloxyla mikmaqiana, joins the oldest known periderm occurrences (Early Devonian), which allow me to construct a model for the development of wound-response periderm in early tracheophytes ..."

H. Sato (2023): The evolution of ectomycorrhizal symbiosis in the Late Cretaceous is a key driver of explosive diversification in Agaricomycetes. Free access, New Phytologist, 241: 444-460.
Note figure 7: Historical character transition of ectomycorrhizal (EcM) symbiosis and dynamics of net diversification rates.
"... Ectomycorrhizal (EcM) symbiosis, a ubiquitous plant�fungus interaction in forests, evolved in parallel in fungi
[...] findings suggest that the evolution of EcM symbiosis in the Late Cretaceous, supposedly with coevolving EcM angiosperms, was the key drive of the explosive diversification in Agaricomycetes ..."

! T.J. Orr and E.M. Roberts (2024): A review and field guide for the standardized description and sampling of paleosols. Open access, Earth-Science Reviews, 253.
"... Paleosols are unrivaled terrestrial archives of paleoclimatic, paleoecological, and paleoenvironmental conditions
[...] we have illustrated and tabulated key paleosol features and classification schemes, including horizon determination and classification; ped determination and classification; mottle description; mineral accumulation description/morphology; burrow/chamber morphology and description; and rhizolith morphology and classification ..."

M.P. D'Antonio and F. Herrera (2024): New Evidence of Unequal Branching in Stigmaria ficoides (Lycopsida). Open access, International Journal of Plant Sciences, 185.
"... Stigmaria ficoides is the main form species of rooting organ for late Paleozoic arborescent lycopsids in the families Diaphorodendraceae and Lepidodendraceae.
[...] we report two S. ficoides specimens based on the presence of the diagnostic rootlet scar pattern ..."

M. Desai et al. (2023): Analyzing the Impact of Social Collaborations on Influence Identification in Scientific Literature Analytic: An Analysis on ResearchGate and Academia International Journal of Information Science, 21: 23-38.
"... Influence identification, one of the compelling applications of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is gaining immense attention in scientific literature analytics
[...] This research examines the impact of followers and followings on influence identification in the scientific domain
[...] The outcome suggested that, like SNA, social collaborations among researchers in terms of followers and followings significantly impact influence identification in the scientific domain ..."

R. Regener (2024): Open Access Green und ResearchGate&xnbsp;� Wie sollten Bibliotheken damit umgehen? Free access, in German. Bibliotheksdienst, 58: 194�205.
"... The article advocates a better understanding of ResearchGate�s success story in order to gain more insights for further improvements and optimization of our library services in the area of Green Open Access ..."

W.M.K. Matsumura et al. (2023): Plant Diversification Through the Devonian in Brazil. PDF file, in: Iannuzzi, R., Rößler, R., Kunzmann, L. (eds.): Brazilian Paleofloras. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90913-4_3-1
See there as well.

! A. Swain (2024): Drivers of herbivore diversity decoupled by leveraging the fossil record. Open access, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., 120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2311010120
"... Damage Types [...] denote functional classifications of insect herbivory on plants. These have remained consistently the same across hundreds of millions of years and therefore, can be used for comparisons across geographical space and geological time despite species turnovers ..."