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set: fossils // series: spore // picture: Lycospora

Lycospora continued.

This spore, known as Lycospora chaloneri Hemsley and Scott, would have contained the male gametes of a Lower Carboniferous (325 million years) lycopsid tree known as Paralycopodites. It was from a cone called Flemingites from the Pettycur Limestone, of Pettycur, Fife, Scotland. The plant was a tree which lived in an equatorial tropical lowland peat-forming bog and reproduced producing these small microspores and larger megaspores containing eggs. The spores illustrated here are about 20 microns (thousands of a millemeter) in diameter and have been photographed using a Scanning Electron Microscope. Spores and pollen are studied in third and fourth year applied palaeontology courses and are the subject of research projects by Professor Andrew C. Scott.

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