PREFACE. 
It is hoped by the author that the following pages will do something to 
supply what has long been felt to be a want in American geology: a better 
knowledge of the fauna and flora of the Triassic rocks of eastern North 
America. These rocks probably furnished the first fossils collected on this 
continent—fossil fishes from Durham and Sunderland, in the Connecticut 
Valley; fossil plants from the coal basin of Richmond, Va.; and, still more 
interesting, the wonderful series of so-called bird tracks first noticed at 
Turner’s Falls, Mass. 
A few of the fossil plants of Virginia were described by Prof. W. B. 
Rogers in the reports of the Association of American Geologists and Natu- 
ralists, 1843, and by Mr. C. J. F. Bunbury in the Quarterly Journal of the 
Geological Society of London, volume 3, 1851, and some notices of the fossil 
fishes, with brief descriptions of certain species, were published by Agassiz, 
Sir Philip Egerton, and Messrs. W. C. and J. H. Redfield, at various times 
between 1838 and 1856. Many figures and descriptions of the remains of 
both plants and animals were also published by Prof. Ebenezer Emmons 
in his Geological Report of the Midland Counties of North Carolina, in 1856, 
but, though deservedly eminent as a geologist, Professor Kmmons had 
little acquaintance with paleontology, and this contribution rather increased 
than satisfied the desire for more thorough knowledge of the life of the At- 
lantic coast in Mesozoic times. No systematic collection nor thorough 
study of the fauna or flora of the formation as a whole was attempted until 
about 1880, when Prof. W. M. Fontaine, of the University of Virginia, began 
a careful review of the fossil plants of the Virginia and North Carolina 
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