Teresa E. V. Spicer

Chinese Academy of Sciences | CAS · Institute of Botany

Premise: Ficus is a scientifically and economically important genus with abundant fossil records from the Paleocene to Pleistocene, but with an intriguing early evolutionary history that remains unresolved. Here, the foliage of three well-preserved figs is described from the early Paleogene succession of Gurha mine, Rajasthan, India. These fossils...

The Eastern Himalayas are renowned for their high plant diversity. To understand how this modern botanical richness formed, it is critical to investigate past plant biodiversity preserved as fossils throughout the eastern Himalayan Siwalik succession (middle Miocene−early Pleistocene). Here, we present a summary of plant diversity records that docu...

Spinescence is an important functional trait possessed by many plant species for physical defence against mammalian herbivores. The development of spinescence must have been closely associated with both biotic and abiotic factors in the geological past, but knowledge of spinescence evolution suffers from a dearth of fossil records, with most studie...

Plants and insects are essential components of terrestrial ecosystems and insect herbivory is the most important type of biotic interaction in these ecosystems alongside the role of insects as pollinators. Insect damaged fossil leaves are the only direct sources of documenting the historical effect of folivorous arthropods on once living foliar tis...

Ten palm leaf impressions are documented from the latest Maastrichtian (late Cretaceous) to early Danian (earliest Paleocene) sediments (K-Pg, c. 66–64 Ma) of the Mandla Lobe of the Deccan Inter-trappean Beds, Madhya Pradesh, central India. The palmate leaf shape along with a definite well-preserved costa support their placement in the subfamily Co...

Plant–insect interactions in the fossil record are, as yet, sparsely known and understudied. Here, we document evidence of a new type of insect skeletonization on Abroma augustum (L.) L. f. (Malvaceae) leaf remains from the latest Neogene (Pliocene) sediments of Chotanagpur plateau, Jharkhand, eastern India. This unique skeletonization feeding trac...

Indian Cenozoic deposits contain well-preserved diverse angiosperm leaf assemblages, but galling, a common form of angiosperm leaf damage in modern tropical forests, has not been well-documented. Here we report insect herbivory on diverse angiosperm fossil leaf specimens from Pliocene (Rajdanda Formation) sediments of the Chotanagpur Plateau, easte...

Evidence of predatory marks on fossil leaf remains provides a unique window into ecological and evolutionary associations of the past, but finding both damage and the phytophagous insects causing that damage pattern in the same fossil specimen is a very rare phenomenon. Normally, caterpillars have little fossilization potential because of their del...

We report for the first time well-preserved leaflets of Hylodesmum palaeoglutinosum from the latest Neogene sediments (Rajdanda Formation: Pliocene) of Jharkhand, eastern India. Macromorphological features show that the fossil leaflet remains are identical to those of modern endemic taxon H. glutinosum (Muhl. ex Wild.) Ohashi & Mill (tribe: Desmodi...

Premise: Microclimatic differences between the periphery and the interior of tree crowns result in a variety of adaptive leaf macromorphological and anatomical features. Our research was designed to reveal criteria for sun/shade leaf identification in two species of evergreen oaks, applicable to both modern and fossil leaves. We compared our resul...

Trapa (water chestnut or water caltrop) is a genus of annual free-floating plants mostly native to Africa and Eurasia and included in the family Lythraceae. The genus only contains 10 species today but has a large number of species in the Neogene record, mainly based on fruits but also on the occurrence of pollen grains. In China, several species h...

Albizia, a diverse tree genus, occupies monsoonal warm, humid rain forests in tropical and subtropical regions. We recovered a well-preserved compound fossil leaf and two fossil fruits of Albizia (Fabaceae) from the latest Neogene (Rajdanda Formation: Pliocene) sediments of Jharkhand of Chotanagpur Plateau, eastern India. On the basis of the archit...

After India separated from Gondwana, its 9000 km northward voyage from the Southern Hemisphere to its modern position joined with Eurasia took 160 million years. During that journey, India experienced a range of climatic conditions due to secular climate variations and its changing latitudinal position. Documenting India's climate during its trans-...

The West Kunlun region forms the northern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, and sedimentation in this region contributed to plateau formation and its northwards expansion, as well as the development of central Asian aridification. However, the stratigraphic dating framework in this region has been ambiguous, hampering the understanding of both tectoni...

Significance The ancient topography of the Tibetan Plateau and its role in biotic evolution are still poorly understood, mostly due to a lack of fossil evidence. Our discovery of ∼47-Mya plant fossils from a present elevation of 4,850 m in central Tibet, diminishes, significantly, that lack of knowledge. The fossils represent a humid subtropical ve...

Dipterocarpaceae, a tropical plant family that forms a major component of low-lying rainforests in Southeast Asia, is represented by a large number of fossils from the Cenozoic sedimentary successions of India, but the origin and antiquity of this family has been actively debated. The earliest reliable dipterocarp megafossils so far reported in Ind...

The Tibetan Plateau was built through a succession of Gondwanan terranes colliding with Asia during the Mesozoic. These accretions produced a complex Paleogene topography of several predominantly east-west trending mountain ranges separated by deep valleys. Despite this piecemeal assembly and resultant complex relief, Tibet has traditionally been t...

The relationship between plant form and climate has been recognised for more than two millennia, and the idea that fossils can indicate climate change was first recorded almost a thousand years ago. Here we review ways of using plant form to reconstruct, quantitatively, past climates, focussing on techniques that have been developed over the past c...

Our understanding regarding the onset and development of the modern South Asia monsoon (SAM) is still incomplete due to its complex nature and differing views about its relationship with major orographic features such as the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau. Climate data derived from some terrestrial and marine sediments from the Neogene suggests the o...

Menispermaceae are a pantropical and temperate family with an extensive fossil record during the Paleogene, especially in North America and Europe, but with much less evidence from Asia. The latest fossil evidence indicates a succession of tropical to sub‐tropical flora on the central Tibetan Plateau during the Paleogene. However, the biogeographic...

Here we study a well-preserved petrified palm stem from the latest Maastrichtian (Late Cretaceous) to earliest Danian (early Paleocene) sediments (c. 66-65 Ma old) of the Deccan Intertrappean Beds of Madhya Pradesh, Central India. We infer its systematic relationships and relevance to palm evolution. The significant anatomical attributes of the fos...

Silicified fossil legume woods of Cynometroxylon Chowdhury & Ghosh collected from the Neogene (late Miocene) sediments of the Bengal Basin, eastern India, exhibit fungal decay seldom found in the fossil record. The wood possesses numerous perforate areas on the surface that seem to be the result of extensive fungal activity. In transverse section,...

Silicified fossil legume woods of Cynometroxylon Chowdhury & Ghosh collected from the Neogene (late Miocene) sediments of the Bengal Basin, eastern India, exhibit fungal decay seldom found in the fossil record. The wood possesses numerous perforate areas on the surface that seem to be the result of extensive fungal activity. In transverse section,...

The early Oligocene represents the beginning of the modern icehouse world. To better understand how vegetation and climate changed during this period, we reconstruct quantitively the early Oligocene vegetation and climate by analyzing fossil spore and pollen assemblages from Lühe basin, Yunnan Province, in southwestern China. The reconstructed pale...

In situ preservation of fossil insect damage in plant fossils is an excellent tool to study the coevolution of flora and fauna through geological time, but finding both damage and the insect causing that damage in the same specimen is a very rare phenomenon. Galling is a common form of angiosperm leaf damage, which can be regarded as a kind of exte...

Ceratophyllaceae Gray is a cosmopolitan submersed family in angiosperm. The fossil record is mainly composed of fruits ranging in age from the Cretaceous to the Neogene within the Northern Hemisphere. However, its fossil record in Asia is sparse. Here we report on a fossil fruit attributed to Ceratophyllum aff. muricatum Cham. from the early middle...

The often-used phrase ‘the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau’ implies a flat-surfaced Tibet rose as a coherent entity, and that uplift was driven entirely by the collision and northward movement of India. Here, we argue that these are misconceptions derived in large part from simplistic geodynamic and climate modeling, as well as proxy misinterpretatio...

The Paleogene environment of today's semi-arid and arid Central Asia is poorly quantified and knowledge of the paleoelevation of northern Tibet remains elusive, yet both are crucially important for understanding inter-relationships between growth of the Tibetan Plateau and Asian monsoon development. Here, we apply the Climate-Leaf Analysis Multivar...

A fossil leaf assemblage from latest Neogene (Pliocene) sediments exposed in Jharkhand of Chotonagpur Plateau, eastern India, is subjected to a CLAMP (Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program) analysis using a new high spatial resolution (~1 km2) WorldClim2 gridded climate data and PhysgAsia2 calibration. The CLAMP analysis of 80 different morpho...

The extinct genus Limnobiophyllum (Araceae) has been considered a tentative link between the Aroideae and Lemnoideae subfamilies of Araceae. General understanding of morphological character evolution among these subfamilies has been limited due to the lack of preserved key structures in fossils such as infructescences. In this study, a new fossil s...

The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else of comparable size on Earth, impacting global climate feedbacks and the Arctic biota. However, a warm Arctic is not novel. The Late Cretaceous fossil record of the region enables a detailed reconstruction of polar environmental conditions, and a thriving extinct ecosystem, during a previous 'hothouse’...

The biodiversity history on the Qinghai‐Tibetan Plateau (QTP) has remained unclear for a long time. Recent palaeobotanical investigations provide opportunities for revealing the phytogeographic history on the QTP in deep time and for testing phylogeographic hypotheses. Lagokarpos is an extinct genus with unknown modern affinities. It is easily dist...

In this study, we developed a tree-ring δ¹⁸O chronology of Abies delavayi from Diancangshan (25°41′N, 100°06′E), in the Hengduan Mountains of Southwest China, spanning 205 years (1810–2014 CE). Tree-ring δ¹⁸O from Abies delavayi showed the highest negative correlation with relative humidity in the spring (r = −0.59, P < 0.05). Therefore, we used ou...

A substantial biotic interchange took place between Gondwanan India and Laurasia immediately following the India-Eurasia collision. Located just north of the collision zone, the role of the Tibetan Plateau in the geographic interchange of biota is still unknown because lack of fossil evidence. Here, well-preserved samara fossils of Ailanthus (the f...

A comprehensive morphotaxonomical evaluation of diverse angiospermic dicotyledonous leaf impressions recovered from the middle part of the Siwalik succession (Subansiri Formation: Pliocene) of Arunachal Pradesh, eastern Himalaya, India, shows that the leaf remains are comparable to modern Glochidion J. R. Forst. and G. Forst. (Phyllanthaceae), Bauh...

Information on whether tyloses in fossil angiospermic plants form specifically in response to infestation with pathogenic fungi has been lacking so far, and thus the evolutionary history of tylosis formation as a physical restraint strategy against the advancing fungi remains unresolved. Our study addresses this knowledge lacuna. Carbonized woods w...

Fossil leaf floras, from the latest Miocene-Pliocene Siwalik Group exposed in Bhutan, sub-Himalaya, are subjected to a CLAMP (Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program) analysis using a high-resolution gridded climate calibration. The CLAMP analysis of 27 different morphotypes of fossil leaves indicates a mean annual temperature (MAT) of 24.1 °C ±...

Yunnan, in southwestern China, straddles two of the world's most important biodiversity hot spots (i.e., a biogeographic region that is both a reservoir of biodiversity and threatened with destruction) and hosts more than 200 fossiliferous sedimentary basins documenting the evolutionary history of that biodiversity, monsoon development, and regiona...

We reconstruct the rise of a segment of the southern flank of the Himalaya-Tibet orogen, to the south of the Lhasa terrane, using a paleoaltimeter based on paleoenthalpy encoded in fossil leaves from two new assemblages in southern Tibet (Liuqu and Qiabulin) and four previously known floras from the Himalaya foreland basin. U-Pb dating of zircons c...

Reconstructions of temperature and moisture regimes based on fossil leaves, combined with tree ring studies, detail the light regime, length of the growing season, and summer and winter temperatures of the Late Cretaceous Arctic. Such constraints have important implications for dinosaur feeding and reproductive behaviour, and the capacity to reside...

AimEarly in their evolution, angiosperms evolved a diversity of leaf form far greater than that of any other group of land plants. Some of this diversity evolved in response to varying climate. Our aim is to test the global relationship between leaf form in woody dicot angiosperms and the climate in which they live.LocationWe have compiled a data s...

Seven fossil leaves with cuticle described here were collected from the lower, middle and upper strata of Siwalik (middle Miocene–lower Pleistocene) sediments of Arunachal Pradesh, India. A detailed comparison of the cuticular analysis of the fossils and their living relatives indicate that these fossil species belong to Dysoxylum raptiensis, Macar...

The percentage of woody dicots with entire-margined leaves in a flora is known to be positively correlated with mean annual temperature (Leaf Margin Analysis — LMA) but this relationship is not globally uniform. In particular the floras of Australia and New Zealand have been regarded as displaying a different physiognomic relationship to climate th...

Fossil leaves from the Siwalik sedimentary rocks of Arunachal Pradesh, eastern Himalaya, evidence a variety of plant-insect interactions that operated during the evolution of monsoon-influenced forests from middle Miocene to lower Pleistocene times. Five principal categories of damage are identified in this study namely leaf mining, hole feeding, s...

Great effort has been expended in developing numerical Earth system (climate) models that, like weather forecasting models, are based on the laws of motion and energy conservation. Most model testing has been against historical meteorological records and proxy climate data extending back a few tens of thousands of years, but for most of that time t...

Erratum to: Palaeobio Palaeoenv (2011) 91:237–255DOI 10.1007/s12549-011-0059-zUnfortunately some mistakes have been noticed in the above- mentioned article after publication. The corrections are as follows:In the text (in pg nos. 237, 252 and 253) all the values of mean annual precipitation (MAP) should be in cm (centimetre) instead of millimetre (...

Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program (CLAMP) is a versatile technique for obtaining quantitative estimates for multiple terrestrial palaeoclimate variables from woody dicot leaf assemblages. To date it has been most widely applied to the Late Cretaceous and Tertiary of the mid- to high latitudes because of concerns over the relative dearth of...

The fossil megaflora, from the late Oligocene deltaic sediments exposed in the Tirap coal mine, Assam, India (27° 17′ 20″ N, 95° 46′ 15″ E), laid down at a palaeolatitude of 10–15° N, records the composition and climate of tropical vegetation during the last episode of pronounced global warmth before the progressive overall cooling to present day c...

The sedimentology, palynofacies and pollen and spore assemblages, together with observations on the preserved megaflora, from the Tirap coal mine, Assam, India (27° 17′ 20″ N, 95° 46′ 15″ E) provide important insights into the composition and distribution of plant communities in a late Oligocene tropical delta (palaeolatitude approximately 18°N). T...

CLAMP Online is a new form-driven web facility enabling Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program (CLAMP) palaeoclimate determinations to be conducted in their entirety without the need for additional software. This facility is demonstrated using physiognomic data from 82 Eocene to Pliocene fossil sites in North America, the Physg3brc CLAMP calibr...