Age and identity of the oldest pine fossils: COMMENT

In their study of charred conifer twigs from the Lower Cretaceous\udChaswood Formation of Canada, Falcon-Lang et al. (2016) established\udthe species Pinus mundayi that they interpreted as a “two needled” pine\udand the oldest stratigraphic evidence for the extant genus Pinus. This is\udbased on their interpretation of what they thought was distinctive wood\udanatomy and paired needle bases of Pinus evident in their fossils, while\udthe Valanginian age (ca. 140‒133 Ma) is based on revised palynostratigraphy.\udIf correctly interpreted, this material predates the oldest known\udspecies Pinus yorkshirensis from the Hauterivian‒Barremian transition at\udca. 131–129 Ma (Ryberg et al., 2012), and pushes back the earliest\udoccurrence of the genus by 4–11 m.y. However, we consider that a more\udthorough examination reveals that P. mundayi is from the Valanginian–\udBarremian (ca. 140–125 Ma) and that Falcon-Lang et al. have misinterpreted\udthe anatomy of their fossils and erroneously assigned them to the\udgenus Pinus