A beautiful display of Glossopteris seed fern leaves preserved within this Permian claystone (Illawarra Coal Measures, Upper Permian; Dunedoo area, New South Wales, Australia) now presented on THE FOSSIL STORE™ designed AES Brass stand series for spaces out there!

Measuring 30.6 CM overall in the stand, this Glossopteris plate is excellent overall with preservation of the archetypical 'sage' shaped leaf embedded within the soft matrix, creating a definitive display of leaves and the reverse of this plate has a similarly beautiful display of Glossopteris Leaves exhibiting very attractive colour palette.

Plants are multicellular, photosynthetic eucaryotes. The oldest known land plant body fossils are Silurian in age. Fossil root traces of land plants are known back in the Ordovician. The Devonian was the key time interval during which land plants flourished and Earth experienced its first “greening” of the land. The earliest land plants were small and simple and probably remained close to bodies of water. By the Late Devonian, land plants had evolved large, tree-sized bodies and the first-ever forests appeared.

Glossopteris is probably the most familiar fossil leaf to non-paleobotanists. The name is Glossopteris is Latinized from two Greek words meaning “tongue-fern”, referring to the elongated shape of individual leaves. Glossopteris was not a true fern - it was a seed fern, a group of primitive gymnosperms. Glossopteris has been reconstructed as a large deciduous tree.

Glossopteris has tremendous significance in the history of geology. The modern-day geographic distribution pattern of Glossopteris fossils was a key piece of paleontological evidence that Alfred Wegener (1915) used in formulating his Continental Drift Hypothesis, the precursor idea to the Theory of Plate Tectonics. Plate tectonics theory is the most significant, all-encompassing theory in all of geology.

The details

Reference cited: Wegener, A. 1915. Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane. Braunschweig. F. Vieweg. 94 pp. [English translation of 4th edition, 1966: The Origin of Continents and Oceans. 246 pp.]

Genus: Plantae, Pteridospermophyta, Glossopteridopsida, Glossiopteris
Origin: Dunedoo, Lightning Ridge, Sydney Basin, southeastern Australia
Age: Deltaic claystone, Illawarra Coal Measures, Permian, 299 - 262,000,000 years

Glossopteris: H: 22.6 CM / W: 16.5 CM / D: 1.7 CM
In stand: H: 30.6 CM / W: 16.4 CM / D: 7.7 CM