COMPARISON OF FRUITS AND SEEDS OF FOSSIL SPIREMATOSPERMUM (ZINGIBERACEAE) WITH THOSE OF LIVING CENOLOPHON A preliminary report from the Phytopaleontological Section, Geological Institute, Aarhus University WALTER L. FRIEDRICH AND B. ESKE KOCH FRIEDRICH, W. L. & KOCH, B. E.: Comparison of fruits and seeds of fossil Spirematospermum (Zingiberaceae) with those of living Cenolophon. Bull. geol. Soc. Denmark, vol. 20, pp. 192-195. Co- penhagen, November, 12th, 1970. Well-preserved fruits of Spirematospermum wetzleri (Heer) Chandler from a new Miocene locality in Jutland, Denmark, are trilocular and have axile placentation. This is in contradiction to previous opi- nions. The fruits are in morphology and anatomy quite similar to those of the living species Cenolophon oxymitrum (Schum.) Holttum from Thailand. The seeds of the living species show spiral striation on the testa which is well-known, from the fossil ones. Fruits and seeds of Spirematospermum wetzleri (Heer) Chandler are fre- quently found in Tertiary deposits of Eurasia. About 100 localities with these very characteristic plant remains are known. Its fruits and seeds were first described from Germany by Heer (1859, p. 192) as Gardenia wetzleri; Ludwig (1860, p. 124) referred it to Passiflora and Menzel (1914, p. 13) found that it probably could be a monocotyledoneous plant. Chandler (1925, p. 19) examined seeds of relevant families and found only in the family Zin- giberaceae a structure similar to this peculiar seedtype. In view of the distinctive characteristic of this fossil and the frequency with which it had been recorded, Chandler (1925, p. 20) gave it a provisio- nal generic name and called it Spirematospermum wetzleri. Previous authors (Heer, 1859, Ludwig, 1860, Menzel, 1914) interpreted the fruits to be unilocular with parietal placentation. Kirchheimer (1936), who studied the material from Salzhausen in Germany, came to the same conclusion. Chandler (1925, p. 19) found in the recent genus Globba - the fruits of which are unilocular with parietal placentation - anatropous seeds with subapical chalaza, having a funnel-shaped hilum with a small plug si- milar to the fossil seeds of Spirematospermum. Globba was therefore ac- cepted by many authors to be a recent relative of Spirematospermum wetz- leri (Heer) Chandler.