page_title: Paleobotany
section_title: Preservation of plant fossils
hierarchical_section_title: Paleobotany / Plant fossils / Preservation of plant fossils
caption_attribution_description: English: fossil of gingkoites
context_page_description: Paleobotany, which is also spelled as palaeobotany, is the branch of botany dealing with the recovery and identification of plant remains from geological contexts, and their use for the biological reconstruction of past environments, and the evolutionary history of plants, with a bearing upon the evolution of life in general. A synonym is paleophytology. It is a component of paleontology and paleobiology. The prefix palaeo- means "ancient, old", and is derived from the Greek adjective παλαιός, palaios. Paleobotany includes the study of terrestrial plant fossils, as well as the study of prehistoric marine photoautotrophs, such as photosynthetic algae, seaweeds or kelp. A closely related field is palynology, which is the study of fossilized and extant spores and pollen.
  Paleobotany is important in the reconstruction of ancient ecological systems and climate, known as paleoecology and paleoclimatology respectively; and is fundamental to the study of green plant development and evolution. Paleobotany has also become important to the field of archaeology, primarily for the use of phytoliths in relative dating and in paleoethnobotany.
context_section_description: Plant fossils can be preserved in a variety of ways, each of which can give different types of information about the original parent plant.  These modes of preservation are discussed in the general pages on fossils but may be summarised in a palaeobotanical context as follows.
  Adpressions (compressions – impressions).  These are the most commonly found type of plant fossil.  They provide good morphological detail, especially of dorsiventral (flattened) plant parts such as leaves.  If the cuticle is preserved, they can also yield fine anatomical detail of the epidermis.  Little other detail of cellular anatomy is normally preserved.  
  Petrifactions (permineralisations or anatomically preserved fossils).  These provide fine detail of the cell anatomy of the plant tissue.  Morphological detail can also be determined by serial sectioning, but this is both time consuming and difficult.
  Moulds and casts.  These only tend to preserve the more robust plant parts such as seeds or woody stems.  They can provide information about the three-dimensional form of the plant, and in the case of casts of tree stumps can provide evidence of the density of the original vegetation.  However, they rarely preserve any fine morphological detail or cell anatomy.  A subset of such fossils are pith casts, where the centre of a stem is either hollow or has delicate pith.  After death, sediment enters and forms a cast of the central cavity of the stem.  The best known examples of pith casts are in the Carboniferous Sphenophyta (Calamites) and cordaites (Artisia).  
  Authigenic mineralisations. These can provide very fine, three-dimensional morphological detail, and have proved especially important in the study of reproductive structures that can be severely distorted in adpressions.  However, as they are formed in mineral nodules, such fossils can rarely be of large size.
  Fusain. Fire normally destroys plant tissue but sometimes charcoalified remains can preserve fine morphological detail that is lost in other modes of preservation; some of the best evidence of early flowers has been preserved in fusain.  Fusain fossils are delicate and often small, but because of their buoyancy can often drift for long distances and can thus provide evidence of vegetation away from areas of sedimentation.
caption: Ginkgoites huttonii, Middle Jurassic, Yorkshire, UK. Leaves preserved as compressions. Specimen in Munich Palaeontological Museum, Germany.
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