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First fossil record of Staphylea L. (Staphyleaceae) from North America, and its biogeographic implications

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Abstract

The occurrences of Staphylea L. (Staphyleaceae) fossils have been abundantly documented from the Cenozoic of Eurasia, but none has been confirmed from North America to date. In this study, we describe Staphylea levisemia sp. nov. on the basis of seed remains from the latest Miocene to earliest Pliocene of northeastern Tennessee, southeastern USA. The seeds are characterized by a smoothly inflated body, a large hilar scar perforated by several vascular traces and bordered by a distinctive lip-like rim, a cuticle coating the seed coat interior, and seed coat section containing weakly developed tiny lumina. According to the paleogeographic distribution of the genus, it is hypothesized that Staphylea originated from western Eurasia no later than the late Oligocene, and arrived in eastern North America no later than the late Neogene, most possibly through the North Atlantic land bridges like many other seed plants.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Herbarium of East Tennessee State University, the Herbarium of Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Froster Levy for help with extant seed materials; the Central Lab of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences for technical assistance with the SEM; Dr. Wen-Long He for picturing the fossil seeds; Miss Hai Zhu for observing the extant seeds of Staphylea from herbarium specimens; Dr. Li Wang for scanning the fossil and extant seeds with the SEM; students from Dr. Jun Wen’s research group for work on molecular phylogenetic analysis; and the two anonymous reviewers for improving the manuscript. This work was supported by NSF EAR-0746105, and partly by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 31300187, 41372002, and 41172008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN, 37614-1730, USA

    Yong-Jiang Huang & Yu-Sheng Liu

  2. Key Laboratory for Plant Biodiversity and Biogeography of East Asia, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, 650204, China

    Yong-Jiang Huang

  3. Department of Botany, MRC 166, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 20560-0166, USA

    Jun Wen

  4. Research Center of Paleontology and Stratigraphy, Jilin University, Changchun, 130026, China

    Cheng Quan

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  1. Yong-Jiang Huang
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  2. Yu-Sheng Liu
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Correspondence to Yu-Sheng Liu or Cheng Quan.

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Handling editor: Jurg Schonenberger.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

606_2015_1224_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Online Resource 1 A taxon-characteristic matrix that includes eight taxa, i.e., the new fossil taxon plus seven extant species of Staphylea, and 23 characteristics (PDF 3549 kb) (PDF 3549 kb)

606_2015_1224_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

Online Resource 2 Seeds of Turpinia occidentalis from the United States National Herbarium (US), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA, with the voucher specimen from St. Elizabeth Parish, P. Arevedo-Rdgz 9532 (US) (PDF 821 kb) (PDF 821 kb)

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Huang, YJ., Liu, YS., Wen, J. et al. First fossil record of Staphylea L. (Staphyleaceae) from North America, and its biogeographic implications. Plant Syst Evol 301, 2203–2218 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-015-1224-z

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