The study of greenhouse climates in the earth's past leads to a greater understanding of the factors that influence today's climate. In this fully integrated volume, leading experts in paleoclimatology present cutting edge paleontological, geological, and theoretical research to assess intervals of global warmth. Coverage examines warm climate intervals during the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic from the same perspectives: oceanic and terrestrial, theoretical and observational. This approach illuminates the differences and, more importantly, the commonalities of warm climate intervals. The book also provides a comprehensive overview of the advantages and limitations of different types of climate models that are currently used, and it discusses major factors that have caused global climatic change across geologic time scales. Central problems that remain unresolved are clearly identified. The book will be of great interest to researchers in paleoclimatology, and it will also be useful as a supplementary text in advanced undergraduate or graduate level courses in paleoclimatology and earth science.

Published in Association with the New York Botanical Garden

The Manual of Leaf Architecture is an essential reference for describing, comparing, and classifying the leaves of flowering plants. This manual, illustrated with dozens of line drawings and more than 300 photographs of prepared stained leaves, provides a framework with comparative examples allowing consistent and detailed description of both modern and fossil leaves. This one-of-a-kind resource will be invaluable to a broad range of people who work with plants, from paleobotanists to systematists to tropical ecologists.

The Manual allows for the description and identification of plants independently of their flowers, offering especially useful assistance in the case of fossil leaves (usually found in isolation) and tropical plants, whose flowering cycles can be brief and irregular, and whose fruits and flowers may be difficult to access. It provides long-needed guidelines for characterizing the organization, shape, venation, and margins of the leaves of flowering plants.

Beginning with a set of illustrated definitions of leaf characters, this manual proceeds to define and illustrate the variations on each of these characters. The system presented here is based on a widely tested scheme but has been significantly expanded and refined through the detailed examination of thousands of living and fossil leaves.