Paleobotany

The Paleobotany is the study of fossil plants. It is an interdisciplinary research field of paleontology and chorology.

The first plants colonized the land already in the Ordovician. Discoveries of well-preserved plant remains there from the late Silurian and mainly from the Lower Devonian. One of the most important sites is Rhynie in Scotland, where the first fossils of the 400 million year old land plant Rhynia were found. These plants are like today's ferns to the spore plants.

In the Upper Devonian, the first seed plants came on. From the Carboniferous period many finds of plants are known which formed the so-called coal forests. You can often find typical forms such as Calamiten or Lepidodendrae in coal seams. The first finds of conifers come from the time of Westfaliums ( Upper Carboniferous ).

The boundaries of the palaeobotanical periods do not always coincide with those of the Palaeozoology since the development of the animal world is always dependent on the evolution of plants and therefore reaches its greatest development only in the sequence. Therefore, the geologist Kurd von Bülow proposed in 1941 before an orientation to the course of development of the plant world for the demarcation of the era. This corresponds to the still valid today and in the German speaking generally accepted classification. However, they could not fully compete in the English-speaking paleobotanical literature. There was often a lack of fossil plant parts as a time marker, are animal fossils have been used, which is why often given the zoological classification of preference.

Further, employs the paleobotany or archaeobotany than neighboring discipline of archeology, with crops of man.