Eddie Spagnuolo

Paleobotanist. PhD Student at Penn State.
NSF GRFP Fellow. Millennium Scholar. He/Him.
Studying SE Asian rainforests through plant fossils.

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

NEW GIANT BEANS! Ancient relatives of the blackbean tree Castanospermum in the Eocene of Borneo! These fossils predate the Sunda-Sahul Collision and suggest this lineage migrated from Asia into Australasia. Check out our new paper #OpenAccess @IJPSJournal https://t.co/e3tzcAXK8C

[Annals of Botany @annbot]

🌿🪨 #PaleoBotanyWeek 🦕

Fossil ferns of the Asian tropics: Salvinia and Acrostichum macrofossils and diverse fern spores from the early Eocene Ghazij Formation (Balochistan, Pakistan) by Spagnuolo and co-authors.

#freeaccess article
👉 https://t.co/n8a14GqreH

#Paleobotany

[Annals of Botany @annbot]

Welcome to our Paleobotany Week!

🌎During the next few days, @annbot will be highlighting articles from the Special Issue "Milestones and trends: the role of the fossil record in reconstructing plant evolution"

💡Stay tuned!

#Paleobotany #PlantEvolution #Botany #PlantScience

[Peter Wilf @RadioGondwana]

Read all about our giant Eocene beans from southern Borneo! Here they are fresh from the coal mine, August 2014. #OpenAccess #Paleobotany #Indonesia @Chismososaurus #Fabaceae

[とよけらとぷす @rex_toyo]

インドネシアの始新世の地層から産出した巨大な豆の化石。
新属新種ジャントゥンスペルムン・グンネリイ Jantungspermum gunnellii として記載されたこの化石植物は、現生のオーストラリアビーンズ（Castanospermum属）に似ているとのこと。
論文フリー
#とよけら論文紹介

[Carlos Góis-Marques @CGoisMarques]

#palaeobotany

[Peter Wilf @RadioGondwana]

First 1 Direct plant-fossil evidence for tropical Asia➡️Australia dispersal 2 Fossil beans from Asian wet tropics 3 Fossils related to Australian Black beans 4 Fossil plants from Indonesia in a century 5 PhD paper for @Chismososaurus .❕❕❕ #paleobotany @PSUEMS #ITB

[Toby Pennington @toby_pennington]

Important new paper with implications for papilionoid legume biogeography

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

NEW GIANT BEANS! Ancient relatives of the blackbean tree Castanospermum in the Eocene of Borneo! These fossils predate the Sunda-Sahul Collision and suggest this lineage migrated from Asia into Australasia. Check out our new paper #OpenAccess @IJPSJournal https://t.co/e3tzcAXK8C

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

Lastly, this work was funded by @NSF @NatGeo @penn_state @PSUEarth @scholarsPSU

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

These seeds are the first macrofossil evidence from pre-collision Sunda (SE Asia) of an extant Sahul (Australia) lineage, the oldest legume macrofossils from the Malay Archipelago, and some of the largest seeds in the entire fossil record!

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

These fossils comprise the first Cenozoic macrofossils from Indonesia in over a century, and serve as a rare snapshot of ancient tropical ecosystems in SE Asia.

This work is also the first chapter of my Ph.D. at @penn_state with @RadioGondwana!

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

We named these seeds Jantungspermum gunnellii gen et sp nov in honor of the late Gregg Gunnell, who led the 2014 trip, and in reference to the heart-shaped morphology of the seeds (jantung for heart in Indonesian, and -spermum for seed in Latin)

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

NEW GIANT BEANS! Ancient relatives of the blackbean tree Castanospermum in the Eocene of Borneo! These fossils predate the Sunda-Sahul Collision and suggest this lineage migrated from Asia into Australasia. Check out our new paper #OpenAccess @IJPSJournal https://t.co/e3tzcAXK8C

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

These fossils were discovered in a coal mine in South Kalimantan Indonesia, in the Eocene Tanjung Fm in 2014 by awesome coauthors @RadioGondwana, J-P Zonneveld, Yahdi Zaim, Yan Rizal, Aswan, @BlochLab, @jibloch, and Russ Ciochon, as well as Doug Boyer and the late Gregg Gunnell

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

We compared these seed fossils to dozens of different extant taxa at the USDA Nat. Seed Herbarium and found that only Castanospermum has the same combination of morphological features seen in our fossils specimens.

[Eddie Spagnuolo @Chismososaurus]

These fossils (star) predate the Sunda-Sahul Collision by at least 10 million years and are the only fossil relatives of Castanospermum, found today only in Australia and neighboring islands (regions encircled by dashes).