Eoengelhardia puryearensis Crepet, Daghlian and Zavada, 1980

Na, Yuling, Blanchard, Jane & Wang, Hongshan, 2019, Fruits, seeds and flowers from the Puryear clay pit (middle Eocene Cockfield Formation), western Tennessee, USA, Palaeontologia Electronica (a 49) 23 (3), pp. 1-57 : 21-23

Eoengelhardia puryearensis Crepet, Daghlian and Zavada, 1980

Description. “Staminate catkins 7 cm or more in length, axes 0.5–0.9 cm wide. Florets alternate, subtended by a three-lobed bract. Bract 2.1 mm in length, lobes sharply incised. Anthers small, 1.0 X 0.3 mm, bilocular, with up to 9–12/floret. Pollen small, mean diam. 14.8 um, straight-sided triangular in polar view, rarely rounded-triangular, triporate, rarely tetraporate, exine finely scabrate, expore rounded-meridionally elongate” (Crepet et al., 1980, p. 367).

Number of specimens examined. None from the Paleobotany Collection at the Florida Museum of Natural History .

Remarks. Eoengelhardia puryearensis Crepet, Daghlian and Zavada (Crepet et al., 1980) was established based on six staminate catkins from the Puryear locality, Tennessee. All specimens reported by Crepet et al. (1980) were reportedly stored at the University of Connecticut Paleobotany Collection (UCPC, now part of the Herbarium at the University of Connecticut, CONN). Unfortunately, an attempt by Wang on a visit to CONN to retrieve the specimens illustrated by Crepet et al. (1980) was not successful, possibly because these specimens are currently stored elsewhere.

This staminate catkin differs from Eokachyra aeolius Crepet, Dilcher, and Potter from the Warman clay pit, Tennessee (Crepet et al., 1975; Wang et al., 2013) in having smaller florets; a shorter, more radial, and more incised subtending bract; and smaller, more triangularly-shaped pollen grains (Crepet et al., 1980).