214 TREE ANCESTORS 



if sanguine advocates are to be believed, one that is destined to 

 win a world wide approval. 



Considerable is known of the ancestral history of the hoUys, 

 over 100 different forms having been discovered in the rocks, and 

 even this large number is quite rightly considered to represent but 

 a fraction of the hollys that have existed during the past history of 

 the earth. They appear first near the base of the Upper Creta- 

 ceous, some 14 different species having been described from the 

 rocks of that age. Half of these Cretaceous forms have been found 

 in Kansas in the geological formation known as the Dakota sand- 

 stone. This sandstone represents the mantle of shore sands spread 

 by the advancing Cretaceous sea that advanced from the Gulf of 

 Mexico and which eventually submerged much of the interior region 

 of North America. 



Thus the earhest known hollys were trees of sandy coastal shores. 

 Almost as old as these Kansas hollys is a holly found in what are 

 knowTi as the Atane beds of western Greenland. Two additional 

 forms have been found in the later Cretaceous of Greenland, and 

 several occurred along our Cretaceous Atlantic coast from Marthas 

 Vineyard, New Jersey, Maryland and Alabama. A single European 

 Upper Cretaceous species has been found in Bohemia, and a late 

 Cretaceous form is recorded from Colorado. 



During Eocene times fifteen different hollys were in existence. 

 A third of these are from rocks of early Eocene age in Dakota, 

 Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and one is recorded from beds 

 of the same age exposed on the south coast of England. Later in 

 the Eocene several hollys occurred in Wyoming and Oregon; and 

 toward the close of the Eocene five different forms occurred in 

 Greenland and one in Alaska. 



x\ll of the 19 Oligocene hollys are from European locaHties. 

 They were apparently most abundant at that time on the Medi- 

 terranean coast of France in the same deposits that have furnished 

 so many sumachs, but they are also found in Italy, Germany, the 

 Tyrol, Bohemia and Styria. Four of these survived into the 

 succeeding Miocene times, and very many new forms made their 

 appearance. In all some 50 different hollys are known from the 



