Sprecher
Beschreibung
Lepidodendron is among the best known and most iconic fossil plant taxa, with its life restorations being a staple of palaeobotanical art since the 1800s. Despite its ubiquitousness in Carboniferous environmental and landscape reconstructions, the significant advances in our anatomical understanding of this taxon are rarely represented in paleoart, with memetic copies of a few influential reconstructions, often with the same inaccurate anatomies, predominating. In response to its misrepresentation, I present a novel life restoration of Lepidodendron, based on a review of measurements and anatomical details available in the current literature. Based on this new restoration, I compare the up-to-date knowledge of Lepidodendron anatomy with that of pre-existing restorations, allowing an assessment of how this taxon has been misrepresented in paleoart for the past two centuries. The novel restoration shows notable differences in total plant proportions when compared to other restorations, and highlights that simple colour inferences can be made based on the macrostructure and periderm anatomy of the trunk. By highlighting the incongruence between paleoartistic representations and data-driven palaeobotanical reconstructions, this new restoration exemplifies the need for new evidence-informed restorations of fossil plants across palaeobotany as a whole.