Biodiversity Interests

What is so fascinating about palaeobotany? It provides us with glimpses of plant life in the past, of what the world looked like in, for example, the time of the great coal swamps, or the era of the dinosaurs. Fossil plants may indicate patterns of evolutionary processes during time, and provide us with insight information in palaeoecological, palaeogeographical and palaeoclimatological mechanisms. Reactions of plants in the past—for example, to changes in atmospheric gasses such as CO2—may be of importance to our understanding the present day greenhouse processes. After all, the past is the key to the present!