Topic summary
Paleosols
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Paleosol.
Paleobotany
Paleosols are an important archive of information about ancient ecosystems and various components of fossil soils can be used to study past plant life. Paleosols often contain ancient plant materials such as pollen grains and phytoliths, a biomineralized form of silica produced by many plants such as grasses. Both pollen and phytolith fossils from different plant species have characteristic shapes that can be traced back to their parent plants. Over long geological time scales, phytoliths may not necessarily be preserved in paleosols due to ability of the poorly crystalline silica to dissolve.