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Discovery of the rare drought-tolerant plant Lesleya (Spermatopsida) from the Buçaco Carboniferous Basin (Stephanian C, western Iberia) and its palaeogeographic, palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic implications

2024; Taylor & Francis; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08912963.2024.2433654

1029-2381

Lara Börjesson, Sofía Pereira, Pedro Correia,

Paleontology and Stratigraphy of Fossils

The plant fossil-genus Lesleya has been reported in various locations in the tropical regions of the Carboniferous and early Permian of central Pangaea. In the Iberian Peninsula, it had so far only been recorded in strata from the lower Stephanian C (ca. global Gzhelian, Upper Pennsylvanian) of the Douro Carboniferous Basin, in northwest Portugal, where two species – Lesleya iberiensis and Lesleya ceriacoi – have been defined. In this paper, we document a new fossil of Lesleya, an adpression (compression-impression) of a large leaf fragment, coming from a succession of Vale da Mó/Monsarros formations in the Buçaco Carboniferous Basin (central-west Portugal), uppermost Stephanian C. This new finding corresponds to the third record of this genus in the Iberian Peninsula, a rare spermatopsid-type plant which inhabited intramontane areas during a drier climatic interval resulting from an interglacial cycle of late Palaeozoic climate change, is characteristic of drought-tolerant (dryland) flora that grew in well-drained, moisture-deficient environments. This new record of Lesleya constitutes an important additional evidence of dispersion of these dry-climate adapted floras in Iberia when new dryland areas emerged.