Abstract
Interactions between plants and insects evolved during millions of years of coevolution and maintain the trophic balance of terrestrial ecosystems. Documenting insect damage types (DT) on fossil leaves is essential for understanding the evolution of plant–insect interactions and for understanding the effects of major environmental changes on ecosystem structure. However, research focusing on palaeoherbivory is still sparse and only a tiny fraction of fossil leaf collections have been analysed. This study documents a type of insect damage found exclusively on the leaves of Parrotia species (Hamamelidaceae). This DT was identified on Parrotia leaves from Willershausen (Germany, Pliocene) and from Shanwang (China, Miocene) and on their respective endemic modern relatives: Parrotia perisca in the Hyrcanian forests (Iran) and Parrotia subaequalis in the Yixing forest (China). Our study demonstrates that this insect DT persisted over at least 15 Myr spanning eastern Asia to western Europe. Against expectations, more examples of this type of herbivory were identified on the fossil leaves than on the modern examples. This mismatch may suggest a decline of this specialized plant–insect interaction owing to the contraction of Parrotia populations in Eurasia during the late Cenozoic. However, the continuous presence of this DT demonstrates a robust and long-term plant–herbivore association, and provides new evidence for a shared biogeographic history of the two host plants.
Highlights
An ecosystem is a set of abiotic environmental conditions with communities of organisms living and interacting therein
This study describes the type of the plant–herbivore interaction found exclusively on leaves of the two known Parrotia species
Our observations demonstrate that modern P. persica and P. subaequalis bear the same insect feeding trace (DT297)
Summary
An ecosystem is a set of abiotic environmental conditions with communities of organisms living and interacting therein. Interactions between organisms contribute to a fragile equilibrium within ecosystems [1,2,3], and this balance can be drastically disturbed by modern human activities [4,5,6]. Global environmental change is expected to affect plant–insect associations in various ways, as insects play significant roles such as herbivores [7] and pollinators for crop production [8]. These interactions are the result of millions of years of evolution [9,10,11]. It is not surprising that many studies have measured significant changes in the patterns of herbivory on fossil leaves through geological time as environmental conditions have changed [16,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]
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