Abstract
It is no accident that the most complete fossil records of land plants are in rocks that formed in shallow, swamp-filled lakes or lagoons, nor is it surprising that there are considerable gaps in the record. Also, both macrofossils (leaves, wood, bark, seeds, etc.) and microfossils (spores, pollen) present considerable problems of interpretation and identification. For example, they may have been carried long distances from their source and may mislead in the reconstruction of the flora of a particular area. Moreover, the primary stage of evolution in flowering plants seems to have been associated with insect rather than wind pollination. Thus, little pollen may have been released and species that may have been important may hardly be represented as fossils at all. In the mid-Cretaceous Dakota flora of Kansas, for example, over 200 angiosperm (flowering plant) types can be identified by macrofossils, but flower pollen represents only 5% of the total pollen types present (Axelrod 1970).
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Collinson, A.S. (1988). The geological record and past distributions. In: Introduction to World Vegetation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-3935-7_2
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