Helicosporous aero-aquatic hyphomycete from the Neogene of the Gray Fossil Site, USA
Grzegorz Worobiec, Elżbieta Worobiec, And Yusheng (Christopher) Liu
We report fungal conidia of helicosporous aero-aquatic hyphomycete found during a survey of palynological slides from samples collected from Neogene deposits at the Gray Fossil Site (Tennessee, USA). They differ from conidia of hitherto described fossil species of helicosporous fungi, therefore, a new fossil-species Helicoonites grayensis G. Worobiec & E. Worobiec sp. nov. is described. Helicoonites grayensis G. Worobiec & E. Worobiec sp. nov. can be compared to those modern genera of helicosporous fungi that are characterised by three-dimensional, barrel-shaped, hollow conidia and are classified as helicosporous aero-aquatic hyphomycetes. In particular, it resembles species belonging to the Helicoon and Helicodendron genera. The ecology of modern helicosporous aero-aquatic hyphomycetes and the presumable palaeoecology of the fossil H. grayensis G. Worobiec & E. Worobiec sp. nov. are discussed.
Key words: Fossil fungus, aero-aquatic hyphomycetes, palaeoecology, Early Pliocene, North America.
Grzegorz Worobiec [g.worobiec@botany.pl, ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2916-9905] and Elżbieta Worobiec [e.worobiec@ botany.pl, ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5997-9602], W. Szafer Institute of Botany, Polish Academy of Sciences, Lubicz 46, 31-512 Kraków, Poland. Yusheng (Christopher) Liu [liuchr@iu.edu, ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4464-1785], Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Indiana University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202, USA.
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