Paleoecology and Biogeography of Miocene Flora

During the Miocene epoch (23–5.3 Ma), Earth’s climate underwent significant cooling yet sustained high levels of precipitation across mid latitudes, fostering extensive subtropical to temperate forests. Paleoecological reconstructions have integrated fossil leaves, wood, fruits, pollen and chemical biomarkers to chart shifts in vegetation communities, revealing the rise and decline of mixed evergreen–deciduous forests, the expansion of savannahs, and the persistence of tropical lineages at higher latitudes than today. Biogeographic analyses indicate that land bridges, orogenies and the closure of seaways governed plant migrations between Asia, Europe and North America, while regional floristic endemism in mountain ranges highlighted refugial dynamics under fluctuating climates. Miocene fossil assemblages from Asia, Europe and the Americas have yielded insights into the early diversification of key angiosperm families, including legume and lythracean lineages, and documented the geographical origins of modern genera. Such studies underpin our understanding of how past climate changes shaped present biodiversity patterns and inform predictive models of vegetation response to ongoing global change.

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Paleoecology and Biogeography of Miocene Flora publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in paleoecology and biogeography of miocene flora across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Palynology: The study of fossil pollen and spores to reconstruct past vegetation and climate.

Macrofloral fossils: Plant remains visible without magnification, such as leaves, fruits and wood, used to infer community composition.

Biomarkers: Molecular compounds preserved in geological materials that indicate the biological source and environmental conditions of ancient ecosystems.

Biogeography: The analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution of organisms to understand migration, dispersal and diversification patterns.

Phylogenetic analysis: Computational methods for reconstructing evolutionary relationships among taxa based on morphological or molecular data.

References

1. Terpenoid Compositions and Botanical Origins of Late Cretaceous and Miocene Amber from China. PLOS ONE (2014).
2. Bilobate leaves of Bauhinia (Leguminosae, Caesalpinioideae, Cercideae) from the middle Miocene of Fujian Province, southeastern China and their biogeographic implications. BMC Ecology and Evolution (2015).
3. Primotrapa gen. nov., an extinct transitional genus bridging the evolutionary gap between Lythraceae and Trapoideae, from the early Miocene of North China. BMC Ecology and Evolution (2020).