The youngest palm fossil record in Tibet suggests that there was no high Tibetan Plateau until the Neogene.

Orogenesis in northern Tibet determines the vegetation and plant diversity of eastern Asia by intensifying winter precipitation.

Significance: The ancient topography of the Tibetan Plateau and its role in biotic evolution are still poorly understood, mostly due to a lack of fossil evidence. Our discovery of ∼47-Mya plant fossils from a present elevation of 4,850 m in central Tibet, diminishes, significantly, that lack of knowledge. The fossils represent a humid subtropical vegetation and some of the 70 different plant forms show affinity to Early-Middle Eocene floras in both North America and Europe. Using leaf architecture, we calculate that the forest grew at ∼1,500-m elevation within an east–west trending valley under a monsoonal climate. Our findings highlight the complexity of Tibet’s ancient landscape and emphasize the importance of Tibet in the history of global biodiversity.

To investigate the effects of palygorskite on chemical forms of heavy metal and microbial functional diversity in the sewage sludge composting, a compost matrix of sewage sludge, wheat straw and varying contents of palygorskite were inoculated with the compound microbial preparation. The chemical speciation analysis by a Community Bureau of Reference-sequential extraction indicated the contribution of palygorskite to reduce the bioavailability of a model metal, Cu, during the composting process. The Biolog EcoPlate^TM test revealed that the microbial community showed better capability of utilizing complex macro-molecules (such as miscellaneous and polymers) in the presence of palygorskite. Increasing the palygorskite contents from 1% to 5%, the microbial activity showed an increasing tendency. However, continuously increasing the palygorskite resulted in a decline of the microbial metabolism. Therefore, appropriate content of palygorskite is an ideal additive for composting, not only enhancing the microbial activity, but also reducing the metal toxicity.