The Fossil Cuticle as a Skeletal Record of Environmental Change

McElwain, Jennifer C.; Chaloner, W. G.

doi:10.2307/3515247

Cited by 135 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…SD versus time for the Phanerozoic. Redrawn from Beerling and Woodward (1997), with additional data plotted from McElwain and Chaloner (1996), Edwards et al (1998), McElwain (1998), Cleal et al (1999) and McElwain et al (1999). Regression is a third order polynomial r 2 0:57; n 132 : Compare trend with Fig.…”

Section: Combined Data Setmentioning

confidence: 95%

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Stomatal density and stomatal index as indicators of paleoatmospheric CO2 concentration

Royer

2001

Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology

381

317

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Section: Combined Data Setmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…The implications are tempting, as epidermal cells are often dif®cult to resolve in fossil material (Beerling et al, 1991;McElwain and Chaloner, 1996). This issue is discussed in the section below.…”

Section: Combined Data Setmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stomatal density and stomatal index as indicators of paleoatmospheric CO2 concentration

Royer

2001

Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology

381

317

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“…After the Carboniferous, the CO 2 concentration is predicted to have increased again in the early Permian and then declined progressively over the past 200 Ma. This pattern of CO 2 change has largely been independently con¢rmed by isotopic analyses of marine and terrestrial organic carbon (see review by Berner (1997)) and changes in the stomatal characteristics of plant fossils (McElwain & Chaloner 1996;Beerling & Woodward 1997). Mathematical modelling of the global oxygen cycle, based on rates of burial and weathering of organic carbon and pyrite sulphur, indicates that atmospheric O 2 also varied markedly during the Phanerozoic (¢gure 1) with values up to 35% in the late Carboniferous (300 Ma).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

The influence of Carboniferous palaeoatmospheres on plant function: an experimental and modelling assessment

Beerling

Woodward

Lomas

et al. 1998

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B

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Geochemical models of atmospheric evolution predict that during the late Carboniferous, ca. 300 Ma, atmospheric O 2 and CO 2 concentrations were 35% and 0.03%, respectively. Both gases compete with each other for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenaseöthe primary C-¢xing enzyme in C 3 land plantsöand the absolute concentrations and the ratio of the two in the atmosphere have the potential to strongly in£uence land-plant function. The Carboniferous therefore represents an era of potentially strong feedback between atmospheric composition and plant function. We assessed some implications of this ratio of atmospheric gases on plant function using experimental and modelling approaches. After six weeks growth at 35% O 2 and 0.03% CO 2 , no photosynthetic acclimation was observed in the woody species Betula pubescens and Hedera helix relative to those plants grown at 21% O 2 . Leaf photosynthetic rates were 29% lower in the high O 2 environment compared to the controls. A global-scale analysis of the impact of the late Carboniferous climate and atmospheric composition on vegetation function was determined by driving a process-based vegetation-biogeochemistry model with a Carboniferous global palaeoclimate simulated by the Universities Global Atmospheric Modelling Programme General Circulation Model. Global patterns of net primary productivity, leaf area index and soil carbon concentration for the equilibrium model solutions showed generally low values everywhere, compared with the present day, except for a central band in the northern land mass extension of Gondwana, where high values were predicted. The areas of high soil carbon accumulation closely match the known distribution of late Carboniferous coals. Sensitivity analysis with the model indicated that the increase in O 2 concentration from 21% to 35% reduced global net primary productivity by 18.7% or by 6.3 Gt C yr À1. Further work is required to collate and map at the global scale the distribution of vegetation types, and evidence for wild¢res, for the late Carboniferous to test our predictions.

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“…However, there are few comparable physiological studies for other plant families. The limited information available has meant that many reconstructions of deep-time environments have relied on morphological analyses which do not necessarily rely on taxonomic identifications, including stomata (McElwain and Chaloner, 1995;McElwain and Chaloner, 1996;McElwain et al, 1999), leaf margin (Wilf, 1997;Royer and Wilf, 2006), leaf size (Royer et al, 2005), or a combination of leaf morphological characteristics (Wolfe, 1995;Gregory-Wodzicki, 2000).…”

Section: Rationale For Developing a Plant Family-based Palaeoclimate mentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating Neotropical palaeotemperature and palaeoprecipitation using plant family climatic optima

Punyasena

2008

Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology

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The Fossil Cuticle as a Skeletal Record of Environmental Change

Cited by 135 publications

References 38 publications

Stomatal density and stomatal index as indicators of paleoatmospheric CO2 concentration

Stomatal density and stomatal index as indicators of paleoatmospheric CO2 concentration

The influence of Carboniferous palaeoatmospheres on plant function: an experimental and modelling assessment

Estimating Neotropical palaeotemperature and palaeoprecipitation using plant family climatic optima

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