Fossils have long been recognized as remnants of plants and animals that lived and died many millennia ago. The animal fossil record was an important factor in the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the 1800's. Pale botany as a subdiscipline can be traced to the efforts of Albert Seward of Cambridge University of England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Studies of plant fossils have resulted in a clearer understanding of plant evolution.
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