“…Phytolith formation in qualitative and quantitative terms is primarily genetically controlled (Dorweiler and Doebley 1997, Piperno et al 2002, Hodson et al 2005, Mitani and Ma 2005, Piperno 2006, Ma et al 2006, 2007a, b, Yamaji et al 2008, Chiba et al 2009, Peleg 2010, Markovich et al 2015, Exley 2015, Kumar et al 2016, McLarnon et al 2017 though environmental factors may sometimes be influential (Jie et al 2010, Liu et al 2013, Dey et al 2015. Due to the strong relationship between plant taxa and phytolith morphometry, these biogenic silicomorphs have been used as a taxonomic proxy (Metcalfe 1960, Twiss 1992, Mulholland and Rapp 1992, Krishnan et al 2000, Raole and Desai 2009, Ball et al 2009, Ahmad et al 2011, Shakoor et al 2014, Jattisha and Sabu 2012, Kealhofer et al 2015, Gu et al 2016, Neumann et al 2017.…”