Kingiodendron and Enterolobium Eocene woods from the El Bosque formation, Chiapas, Mexico
Introduction
Fabaceae is third most diverse family of angiosperms and one of the most ecologically varied plants; this family includes around 730 genera with ~19,400 species (Lewis et al., 2005). There are different theories about the origin of the Fabaceae, some authors had been postulated an African origin during the late Cretaceous, with subsequent migration to South America, and finally to North America (Raven and Polhill, 1981). Nevertheless, due to the availability of continental drift information, more precise information about the phylogenies of legumes, as well as the reinterpretation of Eocene fossils (e.g., Taylor, 1990; Lavin and Luckow, 1993), the Gondwanan hypothesis has lost support. An alternative explanation has suggested that many putatively “archaic” South American taxa correspond to recent branches from the Northern Hemisphere (Doyle and Luckow, 2003). Koenen et al. (2020) proposed as the late Maastrichtian age as the legumes crown age, suggesting that the six main lineages diverged during the late Cretaceous, developing all groups of the modern subfamilies in the Cenozoic based in a phylogenetic study. This proposal has been supported based on a new fossil fruit collected in sediments of the late Campanian of the northern of Mexico (Centeno-Gonzalez et al., 2021).
In Mexico, this family is the second most important group of plants in the extant vegetation (Sousa et al., 2001) and its fossil record has contributed to the hypothesis that the family was established early in low-latitude North America (Calvillo-Canadell and Cevallos-Ferriz, 2005; Centeno-Gonzalez et al., 2021). The fossil record is widely extensive and coming principally from sediments of late Cretaceous to Miocene, and includes fruits, flowers, inflorescences, leaves and leaflets, pollen and woods (Felix and Nathorst, 1899; Berry, 1923; Miranda, 1963; Müller-Stoll and Mädel, 1967; Palacios-Chavez and Rzedowski, 1993; Cevallos-Ferriz and Barajas-Morales, 1994; Magallón-Puebla and Cevallos-Ferriz, 1994; Graham, 1999; Calvillo-Canadell and Cevallos-Ferriz, 2002; Poinar and Brown, 2002; Martínez-Cabrera et al., 2006; Hernandez-Damián et al., 2016; Pérez-Lara et al., 2019a; Centeno-González et al., 2021). These records are related to the genera Inga Mill., Pithecellobium Mart., Lysiloma Benth., Acacia Mill., Mimosa L., Prosopis L., Stryphnodendron Mart., Piptadenia Benth., Desmanthus Willd., Chamaecrista Moench, Senna Mill., Apuleia Mart., Bauhinia Plum. ex L./Cercis L., Copaifera L., Hymenaea L., Crudia Schreb., Caesalpinia Plum ex L., Sophora L., Cladrastis Raf., Andira Lam., Robinia L., Ornithopus L., Dalea L. (Felix and Lenk, 1899; Miranda, 1963; Müller-Stoll and Mädel, 1967; Biaggi, 1978; Palacios-Chávez and Rzedowski, 1993; Cevallos-Ferriz and Barajas-Morales, 1994; Magallón-Puebla and Cevallos-Ferriz, 1994; Graham, 1999; Poinar and Brown, 2002; Calvillo-Canadell and Cevallos-Ferriz 2002, 2005; Martínez-Cabrera et al., 2006). Recently, Pérez-Lara et al. (2019a) described from the El Bosque Formation a new fossil genus with two fossil species named Tzotziloxylon, representing the oldest record based on fossil woods from Mexico.
Fabaceae has a long geological history in Mexico, and it is supposed that during the Eocene some genera of this family had a wide distribution and diversification in North America.
Section snippets
Geological setting
The fossil woods reported in this work were collected in 2016 from a single locality known as “Las Maderas Acala” with coordinates 16°30′41″ N and 92°43′47″ W. This locality is within crop fields located in cultivated fields at 10 km southeast of Acala County, Chiapas, Mexico.
The El Bosque Formation has been dated as Lower Eocene, Sánchez-Montes de Oca (2006) suggests that this Formation was deposited during the Ypresian–Lutetian, and Perrilliat et al. (2006) using radiometric data from several
Materials and methods
The collected samples were processed using the standard thin-section technique (Hass and Rowe, 1999). The woods were sectioned in three planes for a complete observation of its anatomy (cross section, tangential section and radial section). The observations of the anatomical characteristics of the fossil woods, as well as the measures, were obtained taking photographs of the fossils, helped by the Microscope Olympus BX53, and photographed with a digital camera SC100 with sensor CMOS of 10.5
Systematic palaeontology
Order — Fabales Bromhead, 1838
Family — Fabaceae Lindley, 1836
Subfamily — Detarioideae Burmeister
Genus — Kingiodendron Harms.
Species — Kingiodendron mexicanus sp. nov Pérez-Lara, Estrada-Ruiz et Castañeda-Posadas.
Discussion
Fabaceae has a long geological history in Mexico, and it is supposed that during the Eocene some genera of this family had a wide distribution and diversification in North America (Calvillo-Canadell and Cevallos-Ferriz, 2005; Pérez-Lara et al., 2019a; Centeno-Gonzalez et al., 2021), this statement is supported by the new fossil woods present in this report, where it is included two woods, one of them with characteristics that resembles to Kingiodendron and the second one to Enterolobium.
The
Conclusions
The two fossil woods from the El Bosque Formation include the first fossil records of the Detarioideae subfamily and the mimosoid clade from Chiapas, Mexico. These fossil woods contribute to our understanding of the extraordinary diversification of Fabaceae during early Eocene of Mexico. Additionally, these new reports together with previous records from North America reinforce the idea that probably some genera evolved in low-latitude North America instead of arriving from Asia or Africa.
Credit author statement
Diana K. Pérez-Lara, Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Investigation. Emilio Estrada-Ruiz, Resources, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Validation, Writing- Reviewing and Editing. Carlos Castañeda-Posadas, Resources, Supervision, Funding acquisition.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the two reviewers for their comments. This research has been funded by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (240241) and Secretaría de Investigación y Posgrado, Instituto Politécnico Nacional (20180026 and 20195100) grants to E.E.R.
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