Saproxylic arthropod borings in Nothofagoxylon woods from the Miocene of Patagonia

Life in the woods: Taphonomic evolution of a diverse saproxylic community within fossil woods from Upper Cretaceous submarine mass flow deposits (Mzamba Formation, southeast Africa)

“…Examples in which several successive developmental stages of community evolution are recorded are exceptional. In recent years, a few wood assemblages have been documented with diverse saproxylic communities approaching the fossil biota studied here, e.g., from the Cretaceous of Italy (Kustatscher et al, 2013), the Paleogene of Seymour Island, Antarctica (McLoughlin, 2020), and the Miocene of southern Patagonia (Greppi et al, 2018(Greppi et al, , 2021. However, the Mzamba Formation woods contain a markedly more extensive array of fungal hyphae and fungal damage, nematodes, oribatid mites and other organisms.…”

“…Although most past studies of saprotrophs have focused only on fossil fungi (e.g., Wilkinson, 2003;Pujana et al, 2009;Tanner and Lucas, 2013;Feng et al, 2015;Gnaedinger et al, 2015;Toumoulin et al, 2016;Harper et al, 2017;Greppi et al, 2018;Biswas et al, 2020;Gnaedinger and Zavattieri, 2020;Scaramuzza dos Santos et al, 2020;Tian et al, 2020;Gou et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021;Rombola et al, 2022), a few have investigated whole saproxylic biocoenoses. Thus, there are now sporadic fossil records of such communities for most geographic regions and geological periods, especially within the Mesozoic (Taylor and Osborn, 1992;McLoughlin et al, 1995;Slater et al, 2012Slater et al, , 2015Strullu-Derrien et al, 2012;Kustatscher et al, 2013;McLoughlin and Strullu-Derrien, 2015;Greppi et al, 2021;Wei et al, 2019;McLoughlin, 2020;Rößler, 2021). Despite this, very few studies have documented bacterial communities in fossil wood and, as is the case for modern woods, much remains underexplored about their identity, ecology, and interactions with other saproxylic organisms (Johnston et al, 2016).…”

Plant–insect and –fungal interactions in Taxodium-like wood fossils from the Oligocene of southwestern China

“…8A, B, and J). Moreover, the Cerambycids may cover the pupal chambers with calcareous layers (Kimoto and Duthie-Holt, 2004;Greppi et al, 2021), although this is not obviously present on the fossil borings, the CT scan reveals the presence of an outer tunnel lining (possibly formed by calcareous materials or degraded organics) that is quite distinct from the inner (secondary) quartz layer (Fig. 7).…”

“…Borings from non-coleopteran insects are mostly reported from the Mesozoic, especially during the Cretaceous (e.g., Labandeira et al, 1997Labandeira et al, , 2014 J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f McLoughlin and Mays, 2022), as numerous amber and wood fossil studies provide evidence of the upsurge of these arthropods, including wood wasps (Ortega-Blanco et al, 2008), termites (Francis and Harland, 2006), mayflies (Moran et al, 2010), and soldier flies (Han et al, 2022). Compared to the other two eras, there are more damage records from angiosperm wood fossils (Sutherland, 2003;Greppi et al, 2021).…”

Fossil woods from Argentina (1884–2021)

“…Moreover, interactions between plants and fungi (e.g., Greppi et al 2018) and plants and arthropods (e.g., Greppi et al 2021a) are commonly described.…”