TITLE:
Jurassic Flora in Southern Mexico: Anomozamites Schimper, 1870 Emend. Pott et McLoughlin, 2009 from Mixteco Terrane, Phytogeographical Implications of Williamsoniaceae Family (Bennettitales)
AUTHORS:
Diego Enrique Lozano-Carmona, María Patricia Velasco-de León, Miguel Angel Flores-Barragan
KEYWORDS:
Phytogeography, Bennettitales, Wielandiella, North America, Oaxaca
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Geology,
Vol.9 No.3,
March
14,
2019
ABSTRACT: Anomozamites is a fossil-genus of leaf attributed to the Bennettitales, with a distribution mainly in the Kingdom of Laurasia and a stratigraphic range of the Upper Triassic to the Lower Cretaceous. In Mexico there were only reports of some specimens until the 1980s and later of four fossil-species at the beginning of the 21st century, all of them from the Jurassic in the Mixteco Terrane. In this review, three fossil-species of Anomozamites are identified: A. angustifolium is the first of them, which is a fossil-taxon with a range of the Rhaetian to Bajocian and Euramerican distribution; the second one is A. cf. triangularis, of which the geographic and stratigraphic extension of fossil-taxon is proposed; finally, we propose the existence of the A. sp.1, informally named, but with morphological characters that do not match the descriptions of Triassic/Jurassic fossil-taxa. These identifications were made based on macromorphology of the foliar organs and on the review of the diagnostic characters of both the fossil-genus and the fossil-species of taxonomic validity. Then, with this study, the taxonomic and phytogeographic knowledge of Anomozamites during the Jurassic period is increased and this allows reconsidering the amplitude of the Wielandiella distribution, a fossil-genus related to Anomozamites due to the existence of two fossil-taxa in organic connection.