Last week my first first author paper was published, and also my first plant genus and species description! We described Keraphyton mawsoniae, a new fern-like plant from the Late Devonian of Australia. I wrote a little thread about it for #FossilFriday #Palaeobotany #Paleontology 
Our paper is available online #openaccess at peerj.com/articles/9321/ “Keraphyton gen. nov., a new Late Devonian #fern-like plant from Australia” #paleobotany #paleontology #plant #taxonomy (2/17)
The #fossil #plant was first discovered by an amateur geologist on the bank of the Manilla River in Barraba #NewSouthWales… more than 50 years ago #NSW (3/17)
The #fossil was exposed after the major flooding events in January 1964. “Flooding in Barraba is said to have been the worst in history”. weather.wilgatree.com/weather-report… (4/17)
It was dated from the end of the Late Famennian, a period that lasted from 372,2 to 358,9 million years ago at the end of the Late Devonian – a time when Australia was part of the Southern hemisphere super-continent #Gondwana. (Late Devonian map from Percival et al. 2018) (5/17)
The Famennian begins and ends with two of the three major extinction events that constitute the Late Devonian extinction, one of the big 5 #MassExtinctions in the history of life on Earth: the #Kellwasser and the #Hangenberg events. (6/17)
At this time, plants and animals had just started to colonise continents, and the first trees appeared. #LateDevonian (picture R. Millares - Archaeopteris forest) (7/17)
Yet while diverse fish species were in the oceans, continents had no flowering plants, no mammals, no dinosaurs, and the first plants had just acquired proper leaves and the earliest types of seeds. #Devonian (8/17)
The #fossil looks like a fossilized stick, but it’s far more interesting once we cut it and had a look inside. (10/17)
The anatomy of the #Keraphyton specimen is well-preserved, meaning that we can still observe the walls of million-year-old cells in #thinsection #palaeobotany #FossilFriday peerj.com/articles/9321/ (11/17)
We compared the plant with other plants from the same period based on its anatomy only, which provide a lot of information. #plantanatomy (12/17)
Within the first fern-like plants, the #keraphyton mawsoniae stem shares the largest number of characters with iridopterid axes but differs by the pattern of its vascular system. (13/17)
Iridopterids are closely allied to the sphenopsids, a group represented today by the genus #Equisetum, also called #horsetails, that were very abundant in the late #Paleozoic forests. (14/17)
We named the genus #Keraphyton (like the horn plant in ancient Greek), and the species Keraphyton mawsoniae, as a posthumous tribute to our scientific partner Professor Ruth Mawson, a distinguished Australian palaeontologist from Macquarie University. (15/17)
This discovery shows that the Iridopteridales spanned the whole Late Devonian and occurred in the far east of Gondwana. (map adapted from Scotese 2014) (16/17)
The work was part of my Master’s degree thesis at @umontpellier with my two supervisors and co-authors Brigitte Meyer-Berthaud & Anne-Laure Decombeix @UmrAmap in collaboration with @GlobEcoFlinders @Flinders (17/17)
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