European Palaeobotany and Palynology Conference 2026

Historical fossil collections are of fundamental importance for biological and palaeontological research. It is often assumed that such old collections have already been studied so thoroughly as to leave little to be discovered. However, with the advent of new methodologies, such as X-ray tomography, epifluorescence, or Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy (CLSM), it is now possible to retrieve...

The Big Sand Draw fruit and seed flora of the Paleocene Fort Union Formation in the southern Wind River Basin of Wyoming, USA, was initially collected in the 1960s. However, the specimens were only preliminarily studied because of the difficulty of understanding the morphology of disseminules preserved predominantly as moulds. We investigated 161 hand specimens of the highly fossiliferous...

It is in the best interest of any field to ensure that cutting-edge analytical tools remain both user-friendly and accessible to the broader scientific community. As fossil plants are increasingly utilized in deep-time climatology, the deployment of web-hosted tools (such as ‘CLAMP Online’) and R packages (such as DiLP) has paved the way towards an era in which any palaeobotanist, regardless...

Reconstructing the height of ancient trees is crucial for understanding fossil forests in three dimensions, yet modelling ancient height–diameter relationships remains difficult because the trunks of fossil trees are usually fragmentary and rarely preserve their full height. Building on a previously developed growth modelling framework for ancient araucarian trees, we extend this approach to...

Biocodicology is the recently emerging field that aims to analyse the proteins and DNA of medieval manuscripts, originally focused on historical parchments. Here we present a summary of our three-year-long research extending the field of biocodicology into a novel direction of complex palaeobotanical and molecular multi-proxy studies aiming not only for identification of the plants as writing...

Biofilms promote the preservation of organic material by encasing decaying tissues, forming a protective matrix over soft tissue, facilitating mineral precipitation, and slowing down decay. Despite numerous studies on the influence of microbial biofilms on animal fossilization, little is known about the role of microbial biofilms on leaves that may lead to the formation of leaf compressions....

The Bhareli Formation of the West Kameng District, Arunachal Pradesh, India, offers important insights into the early Permian terrestrial ecosystems through the integration of palaeobotanical, charcoal and biomarker evidence. The formation yields plant mega-and microfossil assemblages, alongside bio-geochemical signatures of palaeo-wildfire activity. The megafloral record reflects a typical...

Leaf decay processes are central to understanding plant taphonomy and the formation of fossil leaf compressions. Microbial biofilms and their extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) are increasingly being recognized as key mediators of early decay and preservation. Yet, the influence of leaf biological affinity on biofilm development remains poorly understood. In this experimental study, we...

Leaf-wax n-alkane concentrations and average chain lengths (ACL) significantly vary among extant gymnosperm groups. When investigating deep-time archives, further plant groups need to be considered that since went extinct. Also, entirely aquatic plants, as known in the angiosperm clade, are not known to be amongst any fossil or extant gymnosperm group. The Middle to Late Jurassic macroplant...

Genome size (GS), the amount of DNA in a cell nucleus, varies greatly across land plants, ranging around 2400-fold. Its direct impact on cell size has been linked to key traits such as life strategy, growth habit and rate, habitat preference, geographic range, and diversification rate. Due to genome expansion and contraction mechanisms, GS has varied over time and is hypothesised to have...