Fungalpedia – Note 333, Foliopollenites (Fossil fungi)
Foliopollenites Sierotin.
Citation when using this data: Saxena RK & Hyde KD. 2024 (in prep) – Fungalpedia, Fossil Fungi.
Index Fungorum, Facesoffungi, MycoBank. GenBank, Fig. 1
Classification: Fossil Fungi, Incertae sedis, Amerosporae.
Sierotin (1861) described the monotypic fossil genus, Foliopollenites, from the Early Jurassic (201–174 mya) sediments of Germany. Foliopollenites includes fossil fungal spores shaped like a tapered leaf and surface covered with numerous spines of a little over 1 μm long. Spore wall is two layered, a little more than 1 μm thick, surface chagrinate. Size 27 × 21 μm. Potonié (1966) quoted a letter from Sierotin that “possibly this is a microfossil that can be assigned elsewhere” (than in the flowering plants). After the original publication of the genus (Sierotin 1861), two more species were allocated to this genus, one (F. qaidamensis) by Song (1985) from the Late Eocene-Late Oligocene sediments of Qaidam Basin, Qinghai Province, China and the other (F. taiwanensis) by Huang (1981) from the Miocene sediments of Taiwan.
Type species: Foliopollenites spinosus Sierotin 1961.
Figure 1 – Foliopollenites spinosus. Scale bar = 12 μm. Redrawn from Sierotin (1961)
References
Sierotin T. 1961 – Sporae dispersae im Rhät und Lias von Grossbellhofen (Mittelfranken). Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Freien Universität Berlin, 77 p.
Song ZC. 1985 – A research on Tertiary palynology from the Qaidam Basin, Qinghai Province. Edited by Research Institute of Exploration and Development, Qinghai Petroleum Administration, [and] Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Academia Sinica, 297 p. (in Chinese). Petroleum Industry Press.
Entry by
Ramesh K. Saxena, Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow, India
(Edited by Kevin D. Hyde, Samaneh Chaharmiri-Dokhaharani, & Achala R. Rathnayaka)
Published online 27 August 2024