The Gondwanan heritage of the Eocene–Miocene Patagonian floras

Abstract

The breakup of Gondwana and the associated climatic changes led to the fragmentation of floras that were once connected across the Southern lands. The diversity of the Gondwanan remnants has long been assumed to have fluctuated in Patagonia across the Cenozoic, although it has never been quantified so far. Here we address when the major floristic members of the Gondwanan legacy (e.g., southern beeches, proteas, podocarps, gumtrees) expanded, contracted, or became extinct during the Patagonian biogeographic isolation (Eocene–Miocene) on the basis of the re-assessment of the fossil record (i.e., woods, leaves, and spore-pollen grains). We found that the Patagonian floras experienced moderate to severe shifts in the diversity of the Gondwanan component —relative to the total flora— with the highest estimates in the late Eocene–early Oligocene (~50%) and the lowest estimates in the late Miocene (~20%) according to the fossil pollen record. The most important floristic changes include two major replacements: 1) tropical Gondwanan taxa (e.g., Akania, Eucalyptus, Gymnostoma) by typically cool-temperate taxa (e.g., Nothofagaceae) in the Eocene, and 2) humid taxa (e.g., Podocarpaceae) by arid-adapted floras, mostly of non-Gondwanan affinity, across the Miocene. The variation in diversity of the Gondwanan component from Patagonia shows a striking resemblance to that from Australia for the same period, probably indicating a global-scale driver of floristic turnover (e.g., global cooling conditions). Today, the Patagonian subantarctic forests harbor only about ~15% of the Gondwanan diversity, representing a three-fold decrease from its climax in the late Eocene–early Oligocene.