An introduction to the World's Petrified Woods. 2015. illus. 730 p. gr8vo. Hardcover. - In English.

Shortly after the publication of 'Fossil Wood of China' in 2006 (English version 2008), Shenzhen Fairy Lake Botanical Garden and Shenyang Centre of Geology Survey, China Geological Survey sponsored and organized senior specialists from different institutes, museums and botanical gardens in China to compile another book on fossil wood entitled: 'An Introduction to the World's Petrified Woods'.

Since fossil wood (mostly secondary xylem) specimens usually exhibit limited characters and are preserved separate from other plant organs, it is usually difficult to make detailed and systematic studies of them. Although wood fossils have been reported early in the middle of the 19th Century and from almost everywhere in the world, research in this field has so far been progressing rather slowly. Besides the limitation of character diversity and preservation state as mentioned above, one of the major defects is the difficulty in gathering scattered literature and the lack of systematic and comprehensive publications so far.

Most works deal only with wood fossils collected from local strata and areas, except for a few regional and monographic contributions made by some authors, such as Goppert, Krausel, Gothan Boureau, Vogellehler, Philippe, and Bamfort. In addition to the difficulty of accessing original publications that are from various sources and in different languages, the nomenclatural confusion and invalidation that existed in early works have hindered revision and comparative studies of fossil wood. Only recently has the situation considerably changed with the application of much more efficient methods of communication and circulation, as well as improvement and implementation of an international code of botanical nomenclature.

The present book is partly based on the wood collection of the Fairy Lake Botanical Garden. Besides descriptions of the new materials, the authors spent more than two years collecting and studying published data in scattered literature on a worldwide scale, and summarized the results in this book. It contains diagnoses, type specimens, photographs or figures, and information of geologic and geographic occurrences of more than two hundred genera described since the 19th Century from the Palaeozoic to Cenozoic of about 70 countries and areas on the six continents, with a special discussion on some problematical and confusable generic names, such as Dadoxylon. It includes also large numbers of references and a brief summary on the history, present status and recent progress of fossil wood researches in different parts of the world, and gives a general introduction to the anatomical structure, formation and depositional environment, and the nomenclature and classification of fossil wood. Despite the fact that it contains mainly unanalyzed information and data, which are moreover very incomplete and even fragmentary for some countries & areas owing to the inaccessibility of original publications, it is one of the most comprehensive contributions to world fossil wood researches so far known to us. It provides abundant basic data for studies of the world's wood fossils, their geologic and geographic distribution patterns, palaeoclimates and palaeoenvironments.