Araucariaceae macrofossil record from South America and Antarctica

Abstract

Araucariaceae fossils are abundant in Patagonia and on Seymour (Marambio) and King George (25 de Mayo) islands, Antarctica. Araucariacean macrofossil suites are represented by records of 121 woods, leaves, ovuliferous scales, cones, one seed and seedlings, many of them placed in 50 formalized morphospecies. Although Araucariaceae fossil pollen is known since the Triassic, the oldest reliable macrofossil records in South America and Antarctica are from the Early Jurassic. In the Early Cretaceous, the family reached its widest distribution, with records from northern South America (cones and leaves from Colombia and Brazil). In the Late Cretaceous, the abundance of Araucariaceae began to decline. In the Cenozoic, all the fossils are derived from Patagonia and Antarctica, and this probably reflects a genuine contraction in the family's distribution.

Eocene sedimentary facies in a volcanogenic succession on King George Island, South Shetland Islands: a record of pre-ice sheet terrestrial environments in West Antarctica

“…Rich ter res trial flo ras pre served in Eocene sed i ments of this re gion pro vide sig nif i cant clues about Ce no zoic cli mate change. Several au thors have used var i ous bi otic com po nents to re construct depositional and cli ma tic con di tions dur ing the ac cu mu lation of the sed i men tary se quences: wood (Lucas and Lacey, 1981;Fran cis and Poole, 2002), leaves im print (Zastawniak, 1981(Zastawniak, , 1990(Zastawniak, , 1998Zasta wniak et al, 1985;Zastawniak, 1986, 1989a, b;Li, 1992;Dutra, 2001Dutra, , 2004Hunt and Poole, 2003;Kellner et al, 2007;Fontes and Dutra, 2010), plant and fish as sem blage (Doktor et al, 1996), wood, tree-ring and palynomorph set to gether (Askin and Spicer, 1995;Duan and Cao, 1998;Fran cis et al, 2008;Panti et al, 2012). The terres trial flo ras con firmed a warm (i.e., frost-free) Eocene cli mate with a gen eral cool ing trend up the suc ces sion, cul mi nat ing in a sig nif i cant cool ing dur ing the Late Eocene.…”

Phylogenetic Analysis of Araucariaceae: Integrating Molecules, Morphology, and Fossils

“…The first accepted record of the genus Araucaria dates from the Early Jurassic (Rothwell et al 2012 and citations therein), and therefore, the first diversification of the family must have occurred at least during this time. The Araucaria lineage has a diverse and continuous record across the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, including species with preserved anatomy (some of which were included in this article) and numerous other taxa known from compressions and impressions that have a cosmopolitan distribution (Kendall 1949;Stockey 1975Stockey , 1978Stockey , 1980aStockey , 1980bHarris 1979;Hill and Brodribb 1999;Dettmann and Clifford 2005;Kunzmann 2007;Axsmith et al 2008;Panti et al 2011). Within Araucariaceae, Araucaria is the genus best represented in the fossil record.…”

A new Late Cretaceous (late Campanian to early Maastrichtian) wood flora from southern Patagonia

“…Del Fueyo, 1998; Barreda and Archangelsky, 2006;Herbst et al, 2007;Archangelsky et al, 2009;Panti et al, 2011;Quattrocchio et al, 2011). The Maastrichtian La Irene Formation, which overlies the Cerro Fortaleza Formation, has yielded a diverse microfloral paleoassemblage predominantly composed of terrestrial plants with ferns being the most abundant, followed by angiosperms and, to a lesser amount, gymnosperms (Povilauskas et al, 2008).…”