Original paper
Plant fossils from the Wealden facies (Lower Cretaceous, Berriasian) of Tecklenburg, Westphalia, Germany
Pott, Christian
Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie - Abhandlungen Band 294 Heft 2 (2019), p. 213 - 228
95 references
published: Nov 27, 2019
manuscript accepted: Sep 4, 2019
manuscript received: Jul 22, 2019
ArtNo. ESP155029402005, Price: 29.00 €
Abstract
While the Early Cretaceous flora of the English Wealden has been extensively revised in the last decades, the flora from the German Wealden is still in need of thorough revision. One major account on a flora from Duingen in the eastern Lower Saxony Basin (Niedersächsisches Becken) has been published a couple of years ago, but was covering freshly collected fossil material only. Here, a small flora from the southern margin of the Lower Saxony Basin is reported coming from Brochterbeck, a district of Tecklenburg, at the northern slopes of the Teutoburger Wald mountain range in Westphalia, Germany. The flora shows a slightly different composition compared to those of the ‘classical’ German Wealden: it is also characterised by remains of several delicate filmy ferns and cupressoid (taxodiaceous) conifers, but it is dominated by the presence of leaves of Nilssonia schaumburgensis, while other cycadophytes such as cycads and bennettites are entirely absent. One leaf reminiscent of a Ginkgo species was found as well. The relatively fine-grained sandstones of the rocks comprising the flora at Brochterbeck reflect a terrestrial deposit of the Wealden facies, which was deposited under deltaic freshwater conditions in brackish–limnic conditions in a humid, subtropical climate.
Keywords
Ferns •
cycadophytes •
Nilssonia schaumburgensis
•
conifers •
Teutoburger Wald •
Brochterbeck •
Lower SaxonyBasin