Rich specialized insect damage on Pliocene leaves from the Mahuadanr Valley (India) growing under a warm climate with weak seasonality.

Plant-insect interactions play a crucial role in shaping terrestrial ecosystems, influencing abundance and distribution of plant species. In the present study, we investigated leaf-mining patterns on fossil leaves from Pliocene strata of the Mahuadanr Valley, Jharkhand, eastern India, deposited under a seasonal tropical climate, and reported complex interactions between plants and insects. We identified 11 distinct mining morphotypes.

Marginal leaf galls on Pliocene leaves from India indicate mutualistic behavior between Ipomoea plants and Eriophyidae mites.

We report a new type of fossil margin galls arranged in a linear series on dicot leaf impressions from the latest Neogene (Pliocene) sediments of the Chotanagpur Plateau, Jharkhand, eastern India. We collected ca. 1500 impression and compression leaf fossils, of which 1080 samples bear arthropod damage referable to 37 different damage types (DT) in the 'Guide to Insect (and Other) Damage Types in Compressed Plant Fossils'.

Niche evolution in a northern temperate tree lineage: biogeographical legacies in cork oaks (Quercus section Cerris).

Background And Aims: Cork oaks (Quercus section Cerris) comprise 15 extant species in Eurasia. Despite being a small clade, they display a range of leaf morphologies comparable to the largest sections (>100 spp.) in Quercus.

Cenozoic migration of a desert plant lineage across the North Atlantic.

Previous paleobotanical work concluded that Paleogene elements of the sclerophyllous subhumid vegetation of western Eurasia and western North America were endemic to these disjunct regions, suggesting that the southern areas of the Holarctic flora were isolated at that time. Consequently, molecular studies invoked either parallel adaptation to dry climates from related ancestors, or long-distance dispersal in explaining disjunctions between the two regions, dismissing the contemporaneous migration of dry-adapted lineages via land bridges as unlikely. We report Vauquelinia (Rosaceae), currently endemic to western North America, in Cenozoic strata of western Eurasia.

5S-IGS rDNA in wind-pollinated trees (Fagus L.) encapsulates 55 million years of reticulate evolution and hybrid origins of modern species.

Standard models of plant speciation assume strictly dichotomous genealogies in which a species, the ancestor, is replaced by two offspring species. The reality in wind-pollinated trees with long evolutionary histories is more complex: species evolve from other species through isolation when genetic drift exceeds gene flow; lineage mixing can give rise to new species (hybrid taxa such as nothospecies and allopolyploids). The multi-copy, potentially multi-locus 5S rDNA is one of few gene regions conserving signal from dichotomous and reticulate evolutionary processes down to the level of intra-genomic recombination.

New Fagaceous pollen taxa from the Miocene Søby flora of Denmark and their biogeographic implications.

Premise: The Fagaceae comprise around 1000 tree species in the Northern Hemisphere. Despite an extensive fossil pollen record, reconstructing biogeographic patterns is hampered because it is difficult to achieve good taxonomic resolution with light microscopy alone. We investigate dispersed pollen of Fagaceae from the Miocene Søby flora, Denmark.

Past, present and future distributions of Oriental beech (Fagus orientalis) under climate change projections.

Species distribution models can help predicting range shifts under climate change. The aim of this study is to investigate the late Quaternary distribution of Oriental beech (Fagus orientalis) and to project future distribution ranges under different climate change scenarios using a combined palaeobotanical, phylogeographic, and modelling approach. Five species distribution modelling algorithms under the R-package `biomod2`were applied to occurrence data of Fagus orientalis to predict distributions under present, past (Last Glacial Maximum, 21 ka, Mid-Holocene, 6 ka), and future climatic conditions with different scenarios obtained from MIROC-ESM and CCSM4 global climate models.

Messinian vegetation and climate of the intermontane Florina-Ptolemais-Servia Basin, NW Greece inferred from palaeobotanical data: how well do plant fossils reflect past environments?

The late Miocene is marked by pronounced environmental changes and the appearance of strong temperature and precipitation seasonality. Although environmental heterogeneity is to be expected during this time, it is challenging to reconstruct palaeoenvironments using plant fossils. We investigated leaves and dispersed spores/pollen from 6.

Comment on "Eocene Fagaceae from Patagonia and Gondwanan legacy in Asian rainforests".

Wilf (Research Articles, 7 June 2019, eaaw5139) claim that evolved in the Southern Hemisphere from where it spread to its modern distribution in Southeast Asia. However, extensive paleobotanical records of Antarctica and Australia lack evidence of any Fagaceae, and molecular patterns indicate shared biogeographic histories of , , , and subgenus , making the southern route unlikely.

Genomic landscape of the global oak phylogeny.

The tree of life is highly reticulate, with the history of population divergence emerging from populations of gene phylogenies that reflect histories of introgression, lineage sorting and divergence. In this study, we investigate global patterns of oak diversity and test the hypothesis that there are regions of the oak genome that are broadly informative about phylogeny. We utilize fossil data and restriction-site associated DNA sequencing (RAD-seq) for 632 individuals representing nearly 250 Quercus species to infer a time-calibrated phylogeny of the world's oaks.

Synchrotron X-ray imaging of a dichasium cupule of Castanopsis from Eocene Baltic amber.

Premise Of The Study: The Eocene Baltic amber deposit represents the largest accumulation of fossil resin worldwide, and hundreds of thousands of entrapped arthropods have been recovered. Although Baltic amber preserves delicate plant structures in high fidelity, angiosperms of the "Baltic amber forest" remain poorly studied. We describe a pistillate partial inflorescence of Castanopsis (Fagaceae), expanding the knowledge of Fagaceae diversity from Baltic amber.

Plant fossils reveal major biomes occupied by the late Miocene Old-World Pikermian fauna.

Reconstruction of palaeobiomes, ancient communities that exhibit a physiognomic and functional structure controlled by their environment, depends on proxies from different disciplines. Based on terrestrial mammal fossils, the late Miocene vegetation from China to the eastern Mediterranean and East Africa has been reconstructed as a single cohesive biome with increasingly arid conditions, with modern African savannahs the surviving remnant. Here, we test this reconstruction using plant fossils spanning 14-4 million years ago from sites in Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, the Tian Shan Mountains and Baode County in China, and East Africa.

Comparative systematics and phylogeography of Section in western Eurasia: inferences from plastid and nuclear DNA variation.

Oaks () comprise more than 400 species worldwide and centres of diversity for most sections lie in the Americas and East/Southeast Asia. The only exception is the Eurasian sect. that comprises about 15 species, most of which are confined to western Eurasia.

Plastome data reveal multiple geographic origins of Quercus Group Ilex.

Nucleotide sequences from the plastome are currently the main source for assessing taxonomic and phylogenetic relationships in flowering plants and their historical biogeography at all hierarchical levels. One major exception is the large and economically important genus Quercus (oaks). Whereas differentiation patterns of the nuclear genome are in agreement with morphology and the fossil record, diversity patterns in the plastome are at odds with established taxonomic and phylogenetic relationships.

Smilax (Smilacaceae) from the Miocene of western Eurasia with Caribbean biogeographic affinities.

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Premise Of The Study: Recent molecular studies provide a phylogenetic framework and some dated nodes for the monocot genus Smilax. The Caribbean Havanensis group of Smilax is part of a well-supported "New World clade" with a few disjunct taxa in the Old World. Although the fossil record of the genus is rich, it has been difficult to assign fossil taxa to extant groups based on their preserved morphological characters.

Fagaceae pollen from the early Cenozoic of West Greenland: revisiting Engler's and Chaney's Arcto-Tertiary hypotheses.

In this paper we document Fagaceae pollen from the Eocene of western Greenland. The pollen record suggests a remarkable diversity of the family in the early Cenozoic of Greenland. Extinct Fagaceae pollen types include , which extends at least back to the Paleocene, and two ancestral pollen types with affinities to the Eurasian Group Ilex and the western North American Group Protobalanus.

Evolutionary trends and ecological differentiation in early Cenozoic Fagaceae of western North America.

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Premise Of The Study: The early Cenozoic was a key period of evolutionary radiation in Fagaceae. The common notion is that species thriving in the modern summer-dry climate of California originated in climates with ample summer rain during the Paleogene.•

Methods: We investigated in situ and dispersed pollen of Fagaceae from the uppermost Eocene Florissant fossil beds, Colorado, United States, using a combined light and scanning electron microscopy approach.

Episodic migration of oaks to Iceland: Evidence for a North Atlantic "land bridge" in the latest Miocene.

Dating the subsidence history of the North Atlantic Land Bridge (NALB) is crucial for understanding intercontinental disjunctions of northern temperate trees. Traditionally, the NALB has been assumed to have functioned as a corridor for plant migration only during the early Cenozoic, but recent findings of plant fossils and inferences from molecular studies are challenging this view. Here, we report dispersed pollen of Quercus from Late Miocene sediments in Iceland that shows affinities with extant northern hemispheric white oaks and North American red oaks.

Its evolution in Platanus (Platanaceae): homoeologues, pseudogenes and ancient hybridization.

Background And Aims: Platanaceae is an old family of angiosperms extending back to the Early Cretaceous but consisting of a single extant genus, Platanus. Species of Platanus have long been known to hybridize, and the London plane, Platanus x hispanica, is a well-known example of a hybrid species that formed in historical times. In addition, morphological studies have suggested past interspecific or interlineage hybridization and reticulation as possibly important factors in the evolution of the genus.

Patterns of molecular and morphological differentiation in Fagus (Fagaceae): phylogenetic implications.

To study phylogenetic relationships among species of Fagus, the internal transcribed spacer regions ITS1 and ITS2 of the nuclear ribosomal DNA and morphological data were analyzed. Both molecular and morphologically based phylogenies suggest that Eurasian species of Fagus subgenus Fagus are basal to the North American Fagus grandifolia. The subgenus Fagus is a paraphyletic group basal to three East Asian species forming the subgenus Engleriana.