Paleobotany

The story of the word

Coal is the field's founding evidence: a seam is a compressed swamp, and the Carboniferous forests of giant clubmosses and horsetails are known almost entirely from what miners cut through. παλαιός gave nineteenth-century science a whole prefix, from Palaeolithic to palaeography, wherever old needed saying in Greek. British and American spellings still disagree about the diphthong.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English

First recorded

19th century