concept

Palynology

The study of spores and pollen, including fossil ones. It sounds like a narrow speciality and is in fact the backbone of terrestrial stratigraphy, for a simple reason: the sporopollenin wall is so inert that spores and pollen are the most abundant and most continuous plant fossils in rock. A tree is hard to fossilise; its pollen falls everywhere, every year, in millions of grains. That makes it possible to track vegetation and climate change layer by layer, even where not one trunk survives.