Fruits, seeds and flowers from the Puryear clay pit (middle Eocene Cockfield Formation), western Tennessee, USA

Based on examination of 352 specimens collected from the Puryear clay pit (middle Eocene Cockfield Formation, Claiborne Group), Henry County, Tennessee, we recognize 72 fossil taxa/morphotypes of angiosperms. Thirty-two taxa/morphotypes are related to the following 12 extant families: Altingiaceae (2), Araliaceae (1), Arecaceae (2), Cannabaceae (1), Ceratophyllaceae (1), Euphorbiaceae (1), Fabaceae (11), Fagaceae (7), Juglandaceae (3), Oleaceae (1), Theaceae (1), and Ulmaceae (1). The rest (40 taxa/morphotypes) do not have enough diagnostic characters to assess their modern affinities. We establish two new fossil species Andrewsiocarpon puryearensis sp. nov. (Theaceae) and Paleopanax puryearensis sp. nov. (Araliaceae). Of the 72 taxa/morphotypes recognized, 50 are unique to the Puryear locality (Cockfield Formation), 11 are shared with the Warman locality (Cockfield Formation), eight are shared with the Bovay and Bolden localities (Tallahatta Formation), and three are shared by all three localities. Of the 155 taxa/morphotypes recognized from the Bovay/Bolden, Warman, and Puryear localities, only three taxa/morphotypes are shared by all three localities. This study has expanded our knowledge of the Eocene plant diversity of the southeastern United States and has further confirmed our previous observation that there is a remarkable lack of species overlap among the localities examined to date.