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xi P PReFace, DeDication, anD acKnoWleDGMents The Mesozoic was a curious time. On the surface, it resembled today’s world, but instead of large herbivores like elephants, there were sauropods ; instead of large carnivores like lions, there were tyrannosaurs; instead of trees with flowers and broad leaves, there were pteridosperms and bennettitaleans with naked seeds and fernlike fronds. The Mesozoic was thus a wondrous time. It was an era of giant dinosaurs, flying reptiles, and crown-tufted plants. It also encompassed a huge amount of time, over 185 million years, making the existence of the Mesozoic fauna and flora on earth an incredibly long success story. This is perhaps why there has been a huge resurgence in interest in the Mesozoic biota in the last few decades, although much less attention has been focused on the flora than on the fauna. Yet the Mesozoic plants were more than just stage props for the dinosaurs and their daily activities, as they formed and inhabited a world of their own making. In fact, they were the basic building blocks of landscapes that the world had never seen before and will likely never see again. To describe just a few uniquely Mesozoic plant communities, there were lush forests of ginkgoes, araucarias , stout-trunked bennettitaleans, and low-growing ferns and cycads; there were vast meadows of ferns with scattered groves of seed ferns and woody gymnosperms; there were fleshy-leaved cheirolepidiaceous conifer trees growing on saline soils; there were massive tree-forming ferns with delicate angiosperm vines twining around their trunks. We know all this and more through the efforts of decades of dedicated research by Mesozoic paleobotanists, one of whom—Ted Delevoryas—will be appearing again in this connection. Although the all-encompassing term Mesozoic flora is being used here, the Mesozoic flora was by no means uniform in space or time. Like the modern-day flora, different plants preferred different habitats and had various growth habits, and there were many major plant groups in the Mesozoic that do not have any modern counterpart or living relatives today, such as the enigmatic seed ferns or the bennettitaleans. However, some taxa did survive to this day and can even be recognized to genus level. These living fossils include the sphenophyte Equisetum, the maidenhair tree Ginkgo, and the southern conifer Araucaria, just to name a few. In regard to time, the Mesozoic flora was not static, but evolved and developed over the course of 185 million years. The Triassic, for instance, saw the advent of the Mesozoic flora, the shift from the fernand lycopod-dominated Paleozoic to a largely arborescent assemblage of gymnosperms. The Jurassic was not only the Age of the Dinosaurs but Preface, Dedication, and Acknowledgments xii also the Age of the Cycadophytes. Indeed, the gymnosperms ruled the global flora for most of the Mesozoic, relinquishing their dominance only in the mid-Cretaceous when the radiation of the angiosperms tipped the scales in favor of plants with flowers. Despite being a large, diverse plant group, the gymnosperms had in common several major evolutionary advantages over the ferns and fern allies . One was the development of secondary tissues, such as wood, which enabled gymnosperms to grow into tall, solid trees. Another key innovation was that of the seed, a unit of reproduction and dispersal consisting of a plant embryo and food reserves in a protective seed coat—or, as Ted Delevoryas used to explain to his general botany students, a baby plant in a box with its lunch. Ted Delevoryas is today professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin and is considered one of the leading paleobotanists in America. Ted began his career in 1954, when he graduated with a Ph.D. in botany at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Afterward, he took on a postdoctoral position at the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan, for one year. His first real job, as an assistant professor of botany at Michigan State University, followed in 1955. Ted then taught at Yale University from 1956–1972, except for two years, 1960–1962, at Illnois, before finally moving on to U.T. Austin in the 1970s. Most of Ted’s work has focused on the morphology and evolution of plants in two general areas: first, Paleozoic ferns and seed ferns such as Psaronius, Medullosa, and Glossopteris, and second, Triassic and Jurassic cycads and bennettitaleans, such as Leptocycas, Cycadeoidea, and Williamsonia . In actuality, though, Ted is a morphologist par excellence of the entire plant...

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