These plants occupied various ecological niches.

Podozamites distans

1. Podozamites distans belonged to a family of coniferous trees named Araucariaceae which evolved broad leaves.
2. ​
3. They spread all over the world during the Jurassic; but today they are found only in warm and damp areas such as New Caledonia and Southeast Asia.

Ctenis chinensis

This is a leaf from the cycad Ctenis chinensis. Not many fossils of genuine cycads have been found, since they grew mainly in warm, dry habitats where fossils seldom were formed.

Pterophyllum majus

Pterophyllum majus and other bennettites were common in Sweden during the Jurassic. The museum collections include around 730 fossil leaves from eleven bennettite species, and a total of some 25,000 plant fossils from southern Sweden.

Nilssonia brevis

This fossil was found with numerous other plant fossils at a sandstone quarry in Höör, Sweden.

Nilssonia brevis is one of the largest plants found in that sandstone. It belonged to a group of shrub-sized seed plants named Nilssoniales, about which not much is known. The Swedish Museum of Natural History is currently conducting research on this little understood plant group.

Dictyophyllum spectabile

Dictyophyllum spectabile was a large fern that belonged to a group that is usually called umbrella ferns.

There were many different species of them during the Jurassic, but most were probably forced out of existence by competition from flowering plants and other groups of ferns. Today, there are 13 species remaining in the rain forests of Southeast Asia and the Fiji Islands.

Stenorrhachis scanicus

This fossil cone was found at Höör in Skåne at the end of the 19th century. Although the fossil looks like nothing more than a small, twisted bit of plant debris, it is a treasure chest for museum researchers. With a microscope one can study the cone’s appearance in detail and, among other things, determine which other plants it was related to.

Nilssoniocladus serratus

Nilssoniocladus serratus belonged to a group of shrubs that were fairly common during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous.

Since extinct plants do not have any currently existing relatives from which DNA samples can be taken, scientists must rely on fossils to work out the relationships between the extinct species.

Anomozamites major

Anomozamites major grew in an area that stretched from present-day Sweden all the way to Iran. There were two main families of the plant order Bennittitales. The plants of one looked like short, thick cycads. Anomozamites major belonged to the other, which consisted of slender-stemmed shrubs with interwoven branches.

Drepanolepis

This is a fossilized cone from the conifer Drepanolepis. Its seed-bearing cones were much more open than those of modern conifers, whose seeds are more tightly enclosed.

Drepanolepis probably belonged to an extinct family of conifers.

Ixostrobus

Ixostrobus belonged to a group of ginkgo-like plants named Czeckanowskiales or Leptostrobales. They were common during the Jurassic and the early Cretaceous, but their numbers declined when they were exposed to competition from flowering plants.

Ginkgoites lepidus

Ginkgoites lepidus had small leaves.

Cladophlebis denticulata

• Cladophlebis denticulata was a fern. Ferns were common during the Jurassic in the tropical landscape of what is now the Skåne region of Sweden.
• Cladophlebis belongs to the royal fern family which still exists today. Royal ferns look almost the same as they did 180 million years ago — good examples of “living fossils”.