sampling, Fort Bragg, North Carolina
Early history The earliest reported observations of pollen under a microscope are likely to have been in the 1640s by the English
botanist Nehemiah Grew, who described pollen and the stamen, and concluded that pollen is required for sexual reproduction in flowering plants. By the late 1870s, as optical microscopes improved and the principles of
stratigraphy were worked out,
Robert Kidston and
P. Reinsch were able to examine the presence of fossil spores in the Devonian and Carboniferous coal seams and make comparisons between the living spores and the ancient fossil spores. Early investigators include
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (
radiolarians,
diatoms and
dinoflagellate cysts),
Gideon Mantell (
desmids) and
Henry Hopley White (dinoflagellate cysts).
1890s to 1940s Quantitative analysis of pollen began with
Lennart von Post's published work. Although he published in the Swedish language, his methodology gained a wide audience through his lectures. In particular, his
Kristiania lecture of 1916 was important in gaining a wider audience. Because the early investigations were published in the Nordic languages (
Scandinavian languages), the field of pollen analysis was confined to those countries. The isolation ended with the German publication of
Gunnar Erdtman's 1921 thesis. The methodology of pollen analysis became widespread throughout
Europe and
North America and revolutionized
Quaternary vegetation and
climate change research. Earlier pollen researchers include Früh (1885), who enumerated many common tree pollen types, and a considerable number of
spores and
herb pollen grains. There is a study of pollen samples taken from sediments of Swedish lakes by Trybom (1888);
pine and
spruce pollen was found in such profusion that he considered them to be serviceable as "
index fossils".
Georg F. L. Sarauw studied fossil pollen of middle Pleistocene age (
Cromerian) from the harbour of
Copenhagen. Lagerheim (in Witte 1905) and C. A.Weber (in H. A. Weber 1918) appear to be among the first to undertake 'percentage frequency' calculations.
1940s to 1989 The term
palynology was introduced by Hyde and Williams in 1944, following correspondence with the Swedish
geologist Ernst Antevs, in the pages of the
Pollen Analysis Circular (one of the first journals devoted to pollen analysis, produced by
Paul Sears in North America). Hyde and Williams chose
palynology on the basis of the
Greek words
paluno meaning 'to sprinkle' and
pale meaning 'dust' (and thus similar to the
Latin word
pollen). The archive-based background to the adoption of the term
palynology and to alternative names (e.g.
paepalology,
pollenology) has been exhaustively explored. It has been argued there that the word gained general acceptance once used by the influential Swedish palynologist
Gunnar Erdtman. Pollen analysis in North America stemmed from
Phyllis Draper, an MS student under Sears at the University of Oklahoma. During her time as a student, she developed the first pollen diagram from a sample that depicted the percentage of several species at different depths at Curtis Bog. This was the introduction of pollen analysis in North America; pollen diagrams today still often remain in the same format with depth on the y-axis and abundances of species on the x-axis.
1990s to the 21st century Pollen analysis advanced rapidly in this period due to advances in optics and computers. Much of the science was revised by
Johannes Iversen and
Knut Fægri in their textbook on the subject. == Methods of studying palynomorphs ==