many are of special significance in that they were cut from fossil 

 surfaces immediately adjacent to those used by D.H. Scott to 

 illustrate his classic text Studies in Fossil Botany (1900). Much 

 new Pennsylvanian material was also added to the collections 

 during the tenure of William Darrah as curator from 1936 to 

 1941. In addition to his own extensive collections, Darrah 

 arranged exchanges for European materials identified by Jong- 

 mans and Bertrand and acquired a large collection of the famous 

 Mazon Creek nodules collected by Frederick Thompson, a long- 

 time friend of paleobotany and a Research Fellow in the 

 Museum. Several thousand coal ball peels were prepared and 

 identified during this period, many of them by a young Harvard 

 graduate student named Elso Barghoorn, and these continue to 

 play an important role in paleobotanical teaching in the 

 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. More 

 recent additions to the Museum's Carboniferous collections 

 include materials from the Pennsylvanian of New England de- 

 posited by John Oleksyshyn, Paul Lyons and colleagues, Clifford 

 Kaye, Edward Grew and C.E. Grant. A newly acquired assem- 

 blage donated by Henry L. Barwood documents Pennsylvanian 

 floras from the Warrior Basin of Alabama. 



Other addititions to the Paleobotanical Collections have 

 included a varied suite of fossils particularly rich in Triassic 

 specimens from Arizona donated by Lyman Daugherty, an 



M 



M 



an unrivalled collection of Cretaceous and Tertiary fossil woods 

 donated by the late Frank Hankins, a Research Fellow in the 

 Museum. The petrified wood collection includes several thou- 

 sand geographically widespread specimens and constitutes a 

 major source of information on angiosperm wood evolution that 

 has yet to be fully investigated. These collections have been 

 added to the Paleobotanical Collections during the curatorship 

 of Elso S. Barghoorn, Fisher Professor of Natural History. Dur- 

 ing his 36 years at Harvard, Professor Barghoorn has increased 

 the collections not only through the acquisition of gift materials 

 but also through his own extensive field work. Of particular 



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