We document a new species of ovulate cone (Pararaucaria collinsonae) on the basis of silicified fossils from the Late Jurassic Purbeck Limestone Group of southern England (Tithonian Stage: ca. 145 million years). Our description principally relies on the anatomy of the ovuliferous scales, revealed through X-ray synchrotron microtomography (SRXMT) performed at the Diamond Light Source (UK).
This study represents the first application of SRXMT to macro-scale silicified plant fossils, and demonstrates the significant advantages of this approach, which can resolve cellular structure over lab-based X-ray computed microtomography (XMT).
The method enabled us to characterize tissues and precisely demarcate their boundaries, elucidating organ shape, and thus allowing an accurate assessment of affinities. The cones are broadly spherical (ca. 1.3 cm diameter), and are structured around a central axis with helically arranged bract/scale complexes, each of which bares a single ovule.
I learn more from the anatomy of an ant or a blade of grass … than from all the books which have been written since the beginning of time. This is so, since I have begun … to read the book of God … the model according to which I correct the human books which have been copied badly and arbitrarily and without attention to the things that are written in the original book of the Universe.
(Tommaso Campanella, quoted in Eisenstein 2005, 218)
Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics.
(Galileo, quoted in Eisenstein 2005, 265)