Palaeobotanical websites

Some Palaeobotanical and Palynological Links
	International Organisation of Palaeobotany: The official homepage of the International Organisation of Palaeobotanists maintained by the palaeobotany group of the University of East London (UK) includes IOP Newsletters, PalaeoTalk, the searchable database Plant Fossil Record, IOP member information, Presentations and information on related links. This site has not been updated in a while. However, the most recent IOP Newsletters (from November 2000 onwards) can be found here.
	Paleobotanical Section of the Botanical Society of America. This homepage maintained by Chuck Daghlian (Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH) contains information on the section, publications, news about meetings and announcements, personalia and related links.
	The homepage of the American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists presents its Newsletter, information on publications, meetings, awards, a trading corner, a bulletin board, downloadable palynological data sets, a very useful e-mail and WWW-directory and links to related sites.
	The Commission Internationale de Microflore du Paléozoique (C.I.M.P.) is an international federation of palynologists interested in Palaeozoic palynology. The commission aims to advance knowledge in palynology and related subjects by the promotion of international co-operation and meetings between scientists of all regions and countries. To this end the C.I.M.P. arranges symposia and working groups which deal with various stratigraphical and taxonomic problems in Palaeozoic palynology.
	The Canadian Association of Palynologists presents its history, a summary of palynology in Canada with a directory of palynologists, highlights from newsletters, news about upcoming meetings and further links.
	The International Federation of Palynological Societies is a federation of palynological societies all around the world. The IFPS publishes the newsletter Palynos.
Museums and collectors show their plant fossils on the net:
	The Illinois State Museum maintains a homepage about the famous Pennsylvanian (Upper Carboniferous) Mazon Creek fossils which includes a picture gallery of the common plants.
	The University of California at Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology offers a number of pages on fossil plants. Especially recommended are the pages with short introductions to major groups of (fossil) plants.
	The Paleobotany and Palynology Group of the Florida Museum of Natural History. This site in particular features a listing of all publications in which the museums specimens are figured or cited. This refers only to type and figured specimens. In some cases an illustration accompanies the referenced paper so that the user may see some of the exquisite material. Warmly recommended!
	The Paleontological Museum of The University of Oslo (Norway) has a gallery of fossil plants. Most of the specimens are from the Mesozoic and Tertiary but the selection also includes a number of Devonian and Carboniferous taxa.
	The home page of the Palaeobotany Section of the Senckenberg Natural History Museum and Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) gives an overview of its past and current research activities illustrated with photographs of fossil plants.
	The Homepage of the Geological Survey of Nordrhein-Westfalen (Geologischer Dienst Nordrhein-Westfalen) in Krefeld. Look under Projects and go to Palynologie und Paläobotanik and see some nice fossil plants and learn more about palynology and current research projects.
	The Nova Scotia Museum displays some of its best specimens on the web, including many plant fossils from this classical area. In addition there is also information about important sites, geology, fossil collectors etc. Have a look at the Pennsylvanian floras!
	Carboniferous fossils from the Piesberg near Osnabrück, Germany. These pages, presented by Jens-Wilhelm Janzen, show pictures - mostly of excellent quality - of a wide variety of plant fossils from the Upper Westphalian of the classical Piesberg locality.
	Hans' Paleobotany Pages, maintained by Hans Steur, includes information and pictures on early land plants, the enigmatic plant Parka decipiens, arborescent lycopods and pteridosperms.
	The Carboniferous flora of the Westphalian-D of Zwickau-Oelschnitz, Saxony (Germany) is a classical flora that was originally described by August von Gutbier and Hanns Bruno Geinitz. Although coal mining was given up 20 years ago, new finds can still be made on the old spoil tips as can be seen on Jürgen Meyer's website. Several of the old types are (re)figured
	www.kieseltorf.de is a web site by a group of German hobby palaeobotanists who collect silicified wood and plant-bearing cherts. Most of the material is from the Lower Permian of Saxony (Döhlen Basin, Erzgebirge Basin) but also material from the Donnersberg area (Saar-Nahe Basin) and Nova Paka (Czech Republik) is featured.
	Fossils of Kentucky presents pictures of fossil plants from the Devonian, Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, Cretaceous, Tertiary. These pages are maintained by Don Chestnut for the Kentucky Geological Survey and the University of of Kentucky.
	Monte and Harrison Hieb's Plant Fossils of West Virginia shows a nice series of fossil plants, including some truly spectacular specimens, from the Middle Pennsylvanian (= Upper Carboniferous).
Palaeobotany courses and texts on the web:
	Robert A. Gastaldo's course Paleobotany, includes taphonomic processes responsible for the generation of plant-bearing lithologies, hydrocarbon accumulating systems, biostratigraphic assemblages, paleoecological restorations of the Phanerozoic and evolution of major plant groups.
	The Virtual Paleobotanical Laboratory by Nan Crystal Arens (University of California Berkeley), is a comprehensive treatment of the fossil record of land plants, is divided into 12 chapters, lab I through XII. Each lab has a title page, a page with questions around the group or subject of study, a list of literature and links for further reading and exploration, and a virtual gallery of images from the lab. The directory page is a generalized phylogeny that presents an overview hypothesis of relationships among the land plants.
	The Ginkgo tree, a unicum with a past. An online article by Prof. Dr. W. Jung for the special exhibit "Von der Evolution vergessen? - Lebende Fossilien" (Forgotten by the evolution - living fossils) of the Palaeontological Museum Munich (in German).
Other sites of interest for Palaeobotanists:
	The PaleoNet Pages is a system of listservers, www pages, ftp sites, and a electronic journal designed to enhance electronic communication among palaeontologists maintained by the Museum of Paleontology, University of California Berkeley and the Natural History Museum in London. This link connects you with the London-based server.
	The Palaeontological Association homepage features information about the association, the Palaeontology Newsletter, news about meetings and publications, a list of palaeontologists' e-mail addresses and some useful palaeontological www- sites.
	The Paleontological Society includes information on the society such as activities, publications and a list of links to other web sites.
	The 2nd edition of the Glossary of Pollen and Spore Terminology. This is the new web edition of the glossary by W. Punt, S. Blackmore, S. Nilsson and A. Le Thomas, which was the result of a project of the Working Group on Palynological Terminology, functioning under the auspices of the International Federation of Palynological Societies (IFPS). This 2nd revised www edition is presented by Peter Hoen from whom also a free printed copy of the printed 1st edition (1994) can be obtained. His address is: Laboratory of Palaeobotany and Palynology, Budapestlaan 4, NL-3584 CD Utrecht, The Netherlands.
	Palaeontologica Electronica is a general palaeontological journal of the widest possible scope accesible on the worldwide web. It is envisaged to publish papers, editorials, book reviews, anouncements etc. from any branch of palaeontology, including palaeobotany and palynology. Unlike print-based journals, Palaeontologica Electronica is highly graphical in both format and content. The use of colour in figures and graphics is encouraged. The primary staff of the journal includes five editors and an international board of associate editors.
Searchable databases with information on fossil plants:
	The Index Nominum Genericorum (Plantarum) (ING) is a large searchable database with generic names for all organisms covered by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. This index includes generic names of all extant and fossil plants and is an updated follow-up of the printed version and gives bibliographical citations and information about homonymy, typification and nomenclatural status of generic names. The Index Nominum Genericorum is a collaborative project of the International Association of Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) and the Smithsonian Institution. The ING is edited by Ellen R. Farr (Smithsonian, Washington DC) and Gea Zijlstra (University Utrecht).
	The Palynology Database created by the Canadian Museum of Nature is one of the largest databases on fossil and recent pollen and spores. It includes taxonomic, collection, geographic, preparation, and photographic information about 15,000 species of plants.
	The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK) maintain the IBS: Vascular Plant Families and Genera. This database is linked with the Fossil Record 2.
	TreeBASE is a relational database of phylogenetic information. TreeBASE is a pilot project sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Harvard University Herbaria and the University of California, Davis.
	Fossil Plants and Algae Types is a register of types of fossil plants and algae maintained by the National Museum of Natural History / Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC (gopher menu!).
	The Paleobiology Database is a public resource for the scientific community. It has been organized and operated by a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional group of paleobiological researchers. Its purpose is to provide global, collection-based occurrence and taxonomic data for marine and terrestrial animals and plants of any geological age, as well as web-based software for statistical analysis of the data. The project's wider, long-term goal is to encourage collaborative efforts to answer large-scale paleobiological questions by developing a useful database infrastructure and bringing together large data sets.
	PalDat is the palynological database of the Department of Ultrastructure Research and Palynology, Institute of Botany of the University of Vienna. The database includes a detailed description of the pollen grain (shape in dry and hydrated condition, apertural details, wall-stratification and ornamentation, pollen coatings and cellular condition), images of each pollen grain (LM, SEM and TEM) and basic literature on each genus.
MODERN AND FOSSIL POLLEN DATA	The vision of the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program is to be a national and international catalyst for understanding and modeling interannual to century-scale environmental variability. The NOAA Paleoclimatology Program distributes the product of various collaborative efforts to collect and organize pollen records from around the globe. These data include the pollen counts and related information, as well as several different derived data sets. This page lists the pollen data bases for each continent and provides links to relevant software.
	Palaeoflora is a relational data base providing information about Tertiary plant taxa and their Nearest Living Relatives.At present only selected data are accessible for the public, but work is still in progress.... The current version includes, e.g., descriptions of all data fields provided by Palaeoflora for the entry of fossil or extant taxa, a search area and query for fossil taxa and the temperature requirements of their extant relatives, lastest projects and activities, and a brief description of the method and some examples for its application, presented by the Tübingen Paleobotanical Workgroup.
	Edith L. Taylor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Natural History Museum, University of Kansas: Paleobotanical Database. This excellent database contains 48,000+ bibliographic entries in palaeobotany, palynology, Antarctic paleobiology and women in science. Entries are searchable by various fields.
	The Kew Record of Taxonomic Literature, an excellent database of references relevant to the taxonomy of flowering plants, gymnosperms and ferns made available by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England.
	The New York Botanical Garden: Index to American Botanical Literature. A large index which also includes palaeobotany.
	The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) is a database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of all seed plants. Its goal is to eliminate the need for repeated reference to primary sources for basic bibliographic information about plant names. The data are freely available and are gradually being standardized and checked. IPNI will be a dynamic resource, depending on direct contributions by all members of the botanical community. IPNI is the product of a collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium
	The Fossil Record 2 Database presents the data of the Fossil Record 2 by M.J. Benton (1993, Chapman & Hall, London, 845 pp.).
	Catalogue of Palaeontological Types in Austrian Collections is a searchable database with 26,000 figured (and unfigured) specimens, including many types, from 10 Austrian collections. In addition 800 references are listed. This is a joint project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Österreichische Nationalbank and the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, coordinated by Dr. Johanna Kovar-Eder (Vienna).
Further links & search engines:
	Links for Palaeobotanists by Klaus-Peter Kelber, Department of Mineralogy, University of Würzburg, presents a long list with links for palaeobotanists. This frequently - almost daily (!) - updated list is definitely the best start for a further search. Original contributions on Keuper (Triassic) floras will follow soon!
	WWW Sites of the palynology group of the University of Arizona lists an impressive number of palynological links including institutions and personal homepages.
	Scott's Botanical Links on the homepage of the Botanical Society of America gives an exhaustive list of resources including palaeobotanical and palynological links and other useful sites for palaeobotanists and palynologists
	The Internet Directory for Botany: Paleobotany, Palynology, Pollen being part of the Internet Directory for Botany also gives an excellent list of palaeobotanical and palynological websites