concept

Parataxonomy

The practice of giving separate names to separate fossil plant organs, because plants shed their parts independently and a palaeobotanist usually finds detached leaves, detached wood, detached cones or detached spores. The giant Carboniferous clubmoss carried five different names — one for the trunk, one for the root system, one for the shed leaves, one for the cones, one for the spores — before intact permineralised specimens proved they were all one organism. It is a direct warning to anyone classifying an unfamiliar flora from fragments: the airborne seed, the fallen fruit and the standing trunk of one species are easily catalogued as three.