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Paleontological Research
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Abstract
Abstract.
Morphological and cuticular features of Cunninghamia protokonishii were examined by studying the original material and additional fossils that were collected from the lowest Miocene to the lower Pleistocene of Japan and Korea. The species is characterized by foliar morphology that superficially resembles C. konishii, but differs by large terminal seed cones and seeds, which are more similar to C. lanceolata. Cuticle of C. protokonishii shows a wide range of anatomical variability compared to the two extant species that includes epidermal cell size, stomata distribution, and orientation. Based on foliar morphology, C. protokonishii can be distinguished from all other known fossil and extant species of Cunninghamia described so far. Distribution of C. protokonishii was mostly confined to the Japanese islands, with neighboring areas in Korea and southern Sakhalin. It appeared in eastern Asia by the earliest Miocene—a time prior to the opening of the Sea of Japan—and persisted until the Mio-Pliocene on the Japanese islands.
We are indebted to the following curators for their help to investigate collection material: Naotomo Kaneko (Geological Museum, Geological Survey of Japan, AIST), Hideo Takimoto (Ibaraki Nature Museum), Minoru Tsukagoshi (Osaka City Museum of Natural History), Shinji Tsukawaki (Institute of Nature and Environmental Technology, Kanazawa University), Lutz Kunzmann (Senckenberg Museum and Collections in Dresden, Germany), Stephan Schultka (Museum of Natural History of the Humboldt University Berlin, Germany). We thank Kazuhiko Uemura (National Museum of Nature and Science), Kyungsik Kim and Eun Kyoung Jeong (Chonbuk National University, Korea) for providing their own collections from Japan and Korea. Thanks are also due to Atsushi Ebihara (Department of Botany, National Museum of Nature and Science) for his help to access herbarium specimens and to Martina Dolezych (Senckenberg Museum and Collections in Dresden, Germany) and Jia Hui (Xi'an Shiyou University, China) for helping our bibliographic work. We also express our thanks to Ben LePage (The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia) for his discussion and reading of earlier version of the manuscript. Constructive comments from two anonymous reviewers improved the manuscript very much.
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