LAUSR

‘FossilPlants’ is the name of a small garden in the town of Llanberis which is situated among the mountains of Snowdonia in north-west Wales, UK. It was established by the owner (R.B.-M.) in 2011, with the particular aim of specialising in the cultivation of modern-day representatives of vascular plant groups, the known ancestors of which pre-dated the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event some 66 million years ago. When one of us (L.R.) undertook a bryophyte survey of the garden in October 2017, a small andunfamiliarmemberof theLepidoziaceae was collected from a damp, decorticated log in a low, open shed. Subsequent examination indicated a close match to Telaranea lindenbergii (Gottsche) J.J.Engel & Merrill, as described in Engel and Merrill (2004) and Engel and Glenny (2008) from New Zealand. This identificationwas confirmed by John Engel in January 2018 after he andGaryMerrill examined a sample from the Llanberis site. This is the first record of T. lindenbergii from Britain and, as far as we know, from the northern hemisphere. On a subsequent visit to the garden in February 2018 a further patch of the Telaranea was found on an old section of a Cyathea tree-fern trunk (rhizome) that had been obtained from a nearby but now disused fern nursery, and additional samples were collected. Both male, and the more frequent female plants were obtained. On much of the female material perianths were well developed and protected sub-mature sporophytes. Mature sporophytes were present on subsequent visit in May 2018. Since T. lindenbergii is sporophytic and appears to have the capacity to spread from the garden, it seems especially appropriate to put the arrival of this introduced species in Wales on record. Telaranea lindenbergii was earlier synonymised under T. tetradactyla (Hodgson 1956) before reinstatement by Engel and Merrill (1996); four varieties of T. lindenbergii are recognised by Engel and Merrill (2004) and the plant in Wales appears to be var. lindenbergii. More recent molecular investigation by Cooper et al. (2012) indicated that the genus Telaranea is polyphyletic and T. lindenbergii was subsequently transferred to Tricholepidozia (R.M.Schust.) E.D.Cooper, together with several other species, including T. tetradactyla, by Cooper et al. (2013). The description below is based on samples collected from the Llanberis site in 2017 and 2018.