Revision of the Cretaceous fossil plant-assemblage from Gardeshwar (Gujarat, India): A conifer dominated floral association from an Upper Gondwana sequence on the West Coast of India

Abstract

A small but diverse fossil plant assemblage from Gardeshwar in Gujarat Province of western India is reinvestigated, based on analysis of recently collected specimens that represent previously unrecognised taxa in combination with a critical review of previously reported taxa from the site. The assemblage is dominated by conifers including Brachyphyllum Brongniart, Elatocladus Halle, Pagiophyllum Heer, the cone Conites Sternberg, and ovulate scales of an araucarian conifer. Other plant groups are rare but include notable occurrences of the pteridophytes Lycopodites Lindley and Hutton and Gleichenia Smith, and the seed fern Sphenopteris (Brongniart) Sternberg. This assemblage is important as it represents the only datable fossils available from the Gardeshwar Formation and from the information presented we conclude it belongs to the Lower Cretaceous Allocladus–Brachyphyllum–Pagiophyllum floral biozone. The Gardeshwar assemblage association is unusual as it lacks the distinctive genus Allocladus but includes other taxa more typical of the Lower Cretaceous fern-dominated Weichselia–Onychiopsis–Gleichenia floral biozone, and may represent a transitional assemblage with characters of both biozones. However, this investigation highlights the lack of detailed stratigraphic analyses on the Lower Cretaceous sedimentary sequences of the west coast of India from which it remains uncertain if these two ‘biozones’ are of different ages or whether they represent stratigraphically contemporaneous but ecologically distinct environments.