Abstract
Many, perhaps most, of us received our first formal lesson in natural history by making a leaf collection in grade school. I did, in sixth grade. Mrs. Montelewski, our teacher, was captivated by the study of nature. Her science lessons almost always got us out of the classroom and into the forest behind our school. In autumn, we collected and identified the leaves that gravity delivered to us, brightly colored and crisp. The leaves in this little patch of the North Woods behind our school presented an astonishing variety of shapes that we matched to the drawings and descriptions in various field guides from Mrs. Montelewski’s personal collection, one of which was Richard Preston’s classic North American Trees? which is still worth having.
The diversity of leaf shapes and the diversity of ways North Woods tree species capture the sunlight.
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Notes
- 1.
Preston (1948)
- 2.
Horn (1971)
- 3.
Hickey and Wolfe (1975), Hsü (1983)
- 4.
Bailey and Sinnott (1915) seem to be the first of many authors to calculate paleotemperatures from the proportion of toothed leaves.
- 5.
Baker-Brosh and Peet (1997)
- 6.
Royer and Wilf (2006)
- 7.
Wolfe (1993)
- 8.
Royer et al. (2009)
- 9.
Kawamura et al. (2010)
- 10.
Smith and Carter (1998)
- 11.
Sprugel (1989)
- 12.
Royer et al. (2005)
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© 2016 John Pastor
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Pastor, J. (2016). The Shapes of Leaves. In: What Should a Clever Moose Eat?. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-678-3_7
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