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Original Articles

Oligocene Limnobiophyllum (Araceae) from the central Tibetan Plateau and its evolutionary and palaeoenvironmental implications

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Pages 415-431
Received 16 Oct 2018
Accepted 12 Apr 2019
Published online: 17 Oct 2019
 
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The extinct genus Limnobiophyllum (Araceae) has been considered a tentative link between the Aroideae and Lemnoideae subfamilies of Araceae. General understanding of morphological character evolution among these subfamilies has been limited due to the lack of preserved key structures in fossils such as infructescences. In this study, a new fossil species, Limnobiophyllum pedunculatum Low, Su & Xing sp. nov., is reported based on unusually complete specimens with intact leaves, stolon and attached infructescence and seeds from the late Oligocene of central Tibet, China. It represents the first convincing Limnobiophyllum fossil from the Tibetan Plateau and the first well-documented occurrence from east Asia. Its phylogenetic position was inferred using a matrix of 56 morphological characters and 5226 gene sequences of 41 taxa. Phylogenetic inference based on the matrix suggests that Limnobiophyllum is sister to Cobbania, as well as to the remaining extinct and living genera within the Araceae subfamily Lemnoideae. Reconstruction of vegetative and reproductive character evolution confirms that Limnobiophyllum possessed intermediate characters, especially for infructescences, between the subfamilies Lemnoideae and Aroideae. Within Lemnoideae, both vegetative and reproductive characters show clear reduction and simplification from extinct genera to living lemnoids. These findings shed new light on the evolutionary history of the family Araceae. In addition, the discovery of this species, in association with the surrounding plant megafossil assemblage, suggests a warm, humid lowland environment in the central Tibetan Plateau during the late Oligocene, contradicting previous studies that indicated high elevation of the plateau since the early Palaeogene. However, the extinction of Limnobiophyllum might have been due to both global cooling and orogenesis.

Additional information

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Central Laboratory of Public Technology Service Center of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), particularly to Li Wang and Ting Tang for their guidance and technical support. Thanks to Josef Bogner for constructive discussion on the fossil. We would also like to thank Lars Nauheimer, who supplied the nucleotide sequences needed in this study; Im Hin Ooi and Sven Landrein for some clarification on Araceae morphology; He Tang for conducting the experiment on pollen isolation; John Kek Shen Chua for constructing part of the analyses; and Weiyudong Deng and Jia Liu for figure mapping. Finally, thanks to Ana R. Gouveia for English editing. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41661134049), the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFC0505200), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition (STEP) program, the Strategic Priority Research Program of CAS (No. XDA20070301, XDA20070203, XDB26000000), a grant from the Natural Environment Research Council (No. NE/P013805/1), the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (No. QYZDB-SSW-SMC016), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS (No. 2017439), the Postdoctoral Fellowship of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (CAS), funding from the Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology (CAS, No. 09KF001B04), and the Pioneer Hundred Talents Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. 2016-062 to Y. Xing).

Supplementary material

Supplementary material for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14772019.2019.1611673.

Associate Editor: Paul Kenrick

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