Living and fossil Ginkgo leaves

The data presented here are a collection of images of living and fossil Ginkgo leaves. Mature and fully expanded leaves were harvested from a reproductively immature Ginkgo biloba tree growing in partial shade as a specimen on the campus of The Open University, UK. The specimen was ascended using a ladder and seven branches growing towards the West at approximately halfway up the specimen were removed from the trunk using a saw. Every leaf growing on each branch was plucked from the base of the petiole and dried in a plant press. A total of 468 leaves from a mixture of short-shoots and long-shoots were collected from the specimen. Each of these leaves was photographed next to a scale bar using a digital camera positioned 20cm above a light box. Twenty-two fossil leaves produced by evolutionary relatives of living Ginkgo biloba were extracted from the collections of the Natural History Museum in London, and two fossil leaves were extracted from the geology collections of the School of Environment, Earth and Ecosystem Sciences, The Open University. Each fossil leaf was photographed next to a scale bar using a digital camera and the outline of each fossil was traced using Adobe Illustrator to create a digital outline of each leaf.