Using Fossil Thuja to Explore the Formation of Disjunctive Pattern

What is it about?

Here we firstly 1. Report a new fossil record of Thuja from the late Pliocene sediments in the southeastern margin of the Loess Plateau, North China. The fossil’s nearest living species is Thuja sutchuenensis, which today grows in South China. 2. Recheck and update the global data of fossil Thuja around the world by using the newly published cone and foliar recognition system of Thuja (Sun et al., 2015, Phytotaxa), which excludes a late Cretaceous record of this genus found in North America. 3. Plot the fossil records of Thuja in a set of paleomaps from different time intervals, demonstrating an origin in the high latitudes of North America and presenting additional information regarding Thuja’s migration in time and space.

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Why is it important?

The extant species of genus Thuja show a disjunctive distribution between East Asia (3 species) and North America (2 species). Today we know that Thuja has a long fossil history from the Paleocene to Pleistocene sediments in the Northern Hemisphere with a number of fossil records, however, its evolutionary history remains unclear and the formative process of its biogeographic pattern is inconclusive.

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