Glossopteris

Glossopteris (Ancient Greek: γλώσσα glossa, meaning "tongue", because the leaves were tongue-shaped) is the largest and best-known genus of the extinct order of seed ferns known as Glossopteridales (or in some cases as Arberiales or Dictyopteridiales).

History

The Glossopteridales arose in the Southern Hemisphere around the beginning of the Permian Period (298.9 million years ago). Their distribution across several, now detached, landmasses led Eduard Suess, amongst others, to propose that the southern continents were once amalgamated into a single supercontinent—Pangea. These plants went on to become the dominant elements of the southern flora through the rest of the Permian but disappeared in almost all places at the end of the Permian (252.17 million years ago). The only convincing Triassic records are very earliest Triassic leaves from Nidpur, India, but even these records are somewhat questionable owing to faulting and complex juxtapositioning of Permian and Triassic strata at Nidpur. Although most modern palaeobotany textbooks cite the continuation of glossopterids into later parts of the Triassic and, in some cases into the Jurassic, these ranges are erroneous and are based on misidentification of morphologically similar leaves such as Gontriglossa,Sagenopteris, or Mexiglossa. Glossopterids were, thus, one of the major casualties of the end-Permian mass extinction event.