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Altingioxylon hainanensis sp. nov.: earliest fossil wood record of the family Altingiaceae in Eastern Asia and its implications for historical biogeography

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Abstract

A new species, Altingioxylon hainanensis, is described from the Eocene Changchang Formation of the Changchang Basin on Hainan Island, South China. It is the first record of a fossil wood assigned to Altingiaceae found in China, and the most ancient evidence of wood for this family in eastern Asia. The new species is similar to A. rhodoleioides, known since the Miocene in India and Java Island, and to Altingia hisauchii from the Miocene to Pliocene of Japan. The close resemblance between these species and Liquidambar sp., known from the Middle Miocene of western North America, provides additional evidence for the migration of their ancestors from Asia to North America across the Bering land bridge during the Miocene. Distinctions in ray sizes between the eastern Asian specimens and their contemporaries from Europe to Kazakhstan is suggested as a result of the divergence between the large eastern Asian clade and the North American–west Asian clade within Altingiaceae during the Eocene–Oligocene. The presence of crystals in ray cells may be considered an ancestral condition that persists in the eastern Asian lineages up to the extant Altingia and Semiliquidambar, but which was lost in other Altingiaceae in the course of evolution.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, grant nos. 40972011 and 31070200), the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (grant no. 2012CB822003), the joint project NSFC and the Russian Foundation of Basic Research (grant nos. 41111120083 and 11-04-91175), the Key project of the Sun Yat-sen University for inviting foreign teachers, the Guangdong Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 10151027501000020), the Ministry of Science and Education of Russian Federation (contract no. 16.518.11.7071), and the Open Project of Guangdong Key Laboratory of Plant Resources (grant no. plant01k01). We are grateful to graduate students of Sun Yat-sen University for collaboration in the fieldwork on Hainan Island. We also thank Ms. Margaret Joyner, University of Florida, for improving the manuscript.

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  1. Komarov Botanical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, 197376, Russia

    Alexei A. Oskolski

  2. Geological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 119017, Russia

    Tatyana M. Kodrul

  3. State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol and Guangdong Key Laboratory of Plant Resources, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China

    Jianhua Jin

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  1. Alexei A. Oskolski
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Correspondence to Jianhua Jin.

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Oskolski, A.A., Kodrul, T.M. & Jin, J. Altingioxylon hainanensis sp. nov.: earliest fossil wood record of the family Altingiaceae in Eastern Asia and its implications for historical biogeography. Plant Syst Evol 298, 661–669 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-011-0575-3

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