Organ Taxa
In paleobotany, the term is occasionally substituted for the more correct term "organ taxon", meaning a group of fossils of a particular part of a plant, such as a leaf or seed, whose parent plant is not known because the fossils were preserved unattached to the parent plant. Names given to organ taxa may only be applied to the organs in question - and cannot be extended to the entire organism. However, because a form genus is erected on morphological grounds (which do not change when its affinity is known), a form genus that can eventually be assigned to a higher biological group should not be renamed.
While organ genera can potentially be assigned to a family (even if the other parts of the plant are unknown), form genera usually cannot, although they may be referrable to higher categories (e.g. "Fungi" or "Animalia").
The part of the plant is often, but not universally, indicated by the use of a suffix in the generic name:
- wood fossils may have generic names ending in -xylon
- leaf fossils generic names ending in -phyllum
- fruit fossils generic names ending in -carpon, -carpum or -carpus
- pollen fossils generic names ending in -pollis or -pollenoides.
Read more about this topic: Form Classification
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