Contains the proceedings of the 3rd International Legume Conference, Kew, 1992. The idea for this book onginated with the editors' realization that there is abundant fossil legume material in museum collections around the world that is in need of study, and aspects of legume paleobiology that are worthy of discussion. The goals of this volume are to i) facilitate detailed systematic studies of fossil legumes, ii) bring together in one place as much fossil legume material as possible so that it is more widely available to the palaeobotanical and neobotanical communities, iii) provide a forum for discussions of legume palaeobiology, and iv) integrate palaeobotanical data with current ideas of legume systematics and biology that are based on living plants.
In the first section of this volume detailed studies of several specific fossil taxa are presented. The middle section of the volume presents summaries of fossil legumes from particular geographic areas. The final section of the volume presents contributions that address evolutionary patterns and mechanisms that are relevant to the evolutionary history of the Leguminosae.