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Contributions to the Upper Triassic Chinle flora in the American southwest

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Abstract

This article summarises an investigation of three selected species of fossil gymnosperms collected from the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation of the American southwest. Included here is an emended diagnosis of Lindleycladus arizonicus (Daugherty) comb. nov., a description of Elatocladus puercoensis sp. nov., and a redescription, based on new material, of the contentious plant fossil Dechellyia gormanii Ash. Also, the evidence (excisions and galls) of insect predation found on some of the leaves of the new specimens of D. gormanii is described and compared with that reported earlier on other fossil leaves in the Chinle Formation.

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Acknowledgements

I am pleased to have the opportunity of contributing to this special issue honoring Han Van Konijnenburg-van Cittert. We first met on Prof. Harris’ annual collecting trip to the Yorkshire Jurassic in the spring of 1965. At that time, she was an undergraduate student at Utrecht and I was just finishing my PhD at Reading with Prof. Harris. In other words, we were both just starting out on our own palaeobotanical careers when we met. It has been quite gratifying to see how well she has progressed in the years that have followed our time slogging around in the mud at Hasty Bank and evading high tide at Cayton Bay. It was during this field trip that Han demonstrated her keen eye for fossils by collecting some small bits of rather scrappy material at the Scalby Ness plant bed that I probably would have ignored. Thankfully she did not, because they proved to be the remains of a small male cone containing pollen that she named Pityanthus scalbiensis way back in 1971. Han, judging by your past accomplishments and activities, I am sure that you will keep busy in the future, even if you have threatened to give up on palaeobotany. Good luck and god speed, dear friend, as the old saying goes. As for me, I am grateful to the various superintendents of Petrified Forest National Park who have permitted me to collect plant fossils there over the years, including most of those described here. The helpfulness extended to me by the other officials at the park is acknowledged with thanks. My field work in the park was supported in part by grants from the Petrified Forest Museum Association. I acknowledge with thanks the constructive comments and recommendations of Christian Pott (Stockholm) and Brian Axsmith (Mobile) who reviewed this manuscript and Conrad Labandeira (Washington, D.C.) for his discussions about the evidence of the interactions of insects and the Dechellyia gormanii leaves described here. Finally, I thank Mike Spilde, manager of the EPS/IOM Electron Facility at the University of New Mexico, for helping me obtain the SEM micrographs in Fig. 6.

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  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87120, USA

    Sidney R. Ash

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Correspondence to Sidney R. Ash.

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This article is a contribution to the special issue “Green planet - 400 million years of terrestrial floras. Papers in honour of JHA van Konijnenburg van Cittert”.

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Ash, S.R. Contributions to the Upper Triassic Chinle flora in the American southwest. Palaeobio Palaeoenv 94, 279–294 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12549-014-0150-3

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