The Caytoniales are an extinct order of seed plants known from fossils spanning from the Middle Triassic (Anisian) to the Late Cretaceous (Campanian). They are regarded as "seed ferns" because they are seed-bearing plants with fern-like leaves. Although at one time considered angiosperms because of their berry-like cupules, that hypothesis was later disproven. Nevertheless, many authorities consider them likely ancestors or close relatives of angiosperms. The origin of angiosperms remains unclear, and they cannot be linked with any known seed plants groups with certainty.
The Caytoniales are an extinct order of seed plants known from fossils spanning from the Middle Triassic (Anisian) to the Late Cretaceous (Campanian). They are regarded as "seed ferns" because they are seed-bearing plants with fern-like leaves. Although at one time considered angiosperms because of their berry-like cupules, that hypothesis was later disproven. Nevertheless, many authorities consider them likely ancestors or close relatives of angiosperms. The origin of angiosperms remains unclear, and they cannot be linked with any known seed plants groups with certainty.
==History== The first fossils identified in this order were discovered in the Middle Jurassic Gristhorpe bed of the Cloughton Formation in Cayton Bay, Yorkshire, with the name of the bay giving the name to the group. They have since been found in Mesozoic rocks all over world. It is likely that Caytoniales flourished in wetland areas, because they are often found with other moisture-loving plants such as horsetails in waterlogged paleosols. The first fossil Caytoniales were preserved as compressions in shale with excellent preservation of cuticles allowing study of cellular histology.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).