Taxodiaceous Pollen Cones from the Early Tertiary of British Columbia, Canada

Temporal and spatial characteristics of male cone development inMetasequoia glyptostroboidesHu et Cheng

“…[5][6][7] With regard to male cone morphology, the microsporophyll of Metasequoia consists of the phylloclade at the apex and commonly three microsporangia at the base; these characteristics are consistent with those of Sequoia and Sequoiadendron, 23 which represents a phylogenetic homology among these three genera. However, apart from the opposite arrangement of male cones in the leaf axils, there are several other notable differences in male cone morphology between Metasequoia and the other two genera, including lateral cone attachment on specialized shoots vs terminal on regular shoots, 23 and production of cones in clusters vs solitary. In M. glyptostroboides, male cones are borne on long, pendulous and slender twigs that form panicle-like shoots.…”

Combined LM and SEM study of the Middle Miocene (Sarmatian) palynoflora from the Lavanttal Basin, Austria: Part II. Pinophyta (Cupressaceae, Pinaceae and Sciadopityaceae)

“…Fossil pollen from the Lavanttal Basin shows the same size range and length of papilla in LM as pollen grains from extant Cryptomeria japonica (Thunb. ex L. f.) D. Don (Kvavadze, 1988;Hernandez-Castillo et al, 2005). The sculpturing elements of the fossil pollen are more or less identical to those of the extant species figured by Miyoshi et al (2011), Fujiki andOzawa (2007) and Li et al (2011).…”

“…-LM studies of extant pollen of Cryptomeria (Van Campo-Duplan, 1951;Ueno, 1960;Kvavadze, 1988;Hernandez-Castillo et al, 2005) have shown that intact grains can be distinguished from most other papillate Cupressaceae type pollen. For example, Sequoia grains are larger and have longer papilla, and Glyptostrobus pollen have much shorter papilla.…”

“…Pollen of Cupressaceae has either a papilla in the middle of the leptoma (in Athrotaxis, Cryptomeria, Glyptostrobus, Metasequoia, Sequoia, Sequoiadendron, Taiwania and Taxodium;Van Campo-Duplan, 1951;Kvavadze, 1988) or an ulcus (in all other genera; Bortenschlager, 1990), whereas pollen of the Cephalotaxaceae and the Taxaceae has neither a leptoma nor an ulcus. Papillate pollen of Cupressaceae can be ascribed to genera according to the size and length of the papilla seen under LM (Van Campo-Duplan, 1951;Kvavadze, 1988;Serbet & Stockey, 1991;Hernandez-Castillo et al, 2005) and by the sculptural elements seen under scanning electron microscopy (SEM) (Fujiki et al, 2005;Fujiki & Ozawa, 2007;Li et al, 2011;Miyoshi et al, 2011). Pollen of Sciadopityaceae is comparable in size to the largest pollen of the Cupressaceae/Cephalotaxaceae/Taxaceae group or slightly larger.…”

Stockeystrobusgen. nov. (Cupressaceae), and the evolutionary diversification of sequoioid conifer seed cones

“…Species of particularly informative systematic significance are represented by reproductive organs (e.g., Florin 1938Florin -1945La Pasha and Miller 1981;Clement-Westerhof and van Konijenberg-van Cittert 1991;Matsumato et al 1997;Hernandez-Castillo et al 2001;Hernandez-Castillo et al 2005;Escapa et al 2008;Rothwell et al 2011;Bosma et al 2012;Leslie et al 2012). These include the most ancient representatives of the family Cupressaceae (Escapa et al 2008) and specimens that display apparently pleisomorphic seed cone morphologies within the family (Spencer et al 2015).…”