Carboniferous and Permian plants of China

Palaeozoic plants

In 1927, Prof. Thore G. Halle published a major monograph “Palaeozoic Plants from Central Shansi", which represented one of the most important studies on the Chinese Permian floras and includes the type specimens of many species.

The Chinese Carboniferous-Permian floras are rich in sphenopsids, ferns, Tingiales, Noeggerathiales, Medullosales, early Ginkgoales and conifers, Gigantopteridales, and a range of plant groups with obscure affinities. These plants, represented mostly by fossil leaves, are also associated with numerous fertile organs and have vegetative adaptations that help paleobotanists understand the reproductive biology and ecology of the late Paleozoic wet-tropical floras of east Asia.

Some of these broad-leafed plants had liana-like adaptations and formed some of the Earth’s earliest rainforest (closed-forest) communities, long before the appearance of angiosperm-dominated rainforests in the Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic.

Pictures from the collection: