Plant Trace Fossils

Discriminating between plant body-fossils and biogenic structures resulting from plant activity is often difficult. This difficulty is a consequence not only of their modes of life but also of semantic problems and differences in viewpoint among various workers. However, structures resulting from plant activity afford important information both to ichnologists and to paleo-biologists in general, and merit fuller study than they have hitherto received.

Four major groups of plant traces—borings and attachment traces, phytoliths, root molds and casts, and stromatolites—are discussed here, including an evaluation of their ecological and biological significance and their status as trace fossils. Only stromatolites have hitherto attracted a significant degree of attention from geologists.