XII TRIASSIC FISHES AND PLANTS. 
Mesozoic coal basins. His results were published in a memoir on The 
Older Mesozoic Flora of Virginia, which was issued in 1883, as volume 4 
of the Monographs of the U. 8. Geological Survey. This threw a flood of - 
light upon the vegetation of the Atlantic coast in the Mesozoic ages and 
established beyond question the parallelism of our New Red Sandstone with 
the Keuper of Europe; a matter which had been much debated, with 
somewhat discordant conclusions, by Hitchcock, the brothers Rogers, 
Lyell, Marcou, and Emmons. 
Thus one of the wants which has been referred to was satisfactorily 
supplied; but the animal remains found in our Triassic rocks are still to be 
systematically reviewed. The immense series of tracks of terrestrial ani- 
mals found on the old beaches of the Triassic estuaries—the autographs, 
as I have elsewhere called them, of at least one hundred different kinds of 
bipeds and quadrupeds of diverse sizes and structures which inhabited the 
eastern coast of North America in the Triassic age, and left little other ree- 
ord of their existence—though beautifully illustrated by Hitchcock and 
Deane, are still as mysterious and tantalizing as ever. Comparatively few 
bones of the animals themselves have been met with up to the, present time ; 
but these confirm the conclusions, drawn from the remains of terrestrial Mes- 
ozoic animals found elsewhere, that the tracks referred to were not made 
by birds as first supposed, but by reptiles or amphibians. Doubtless in fu- 
ture years some Mesozoic cemetery will be discovered like those of Tilgate 
Forest in England and Bernissart in Belgium, where the abundance of ver- 
tebrate remains and the perfection of their preservation will permit the re- 
habilitation of this interesting fauna. 
The fossil fishes of our Triassic rocks have long needed a fuller ex- 
position than had thitherto been given to them. The materials upon which 
the Messrs. Redfield based their important contributions to our knowl- 
edge of this group of fossils were incidentally collected from surface expos- 
ures and were necessarily limited in quantity, the fossils themselves were 
generally fragmentary and imperfect, and an interval of more than thirty 
years has elapsed since their last communication was made on this subject. 
Having long been interested in the Paleozoic fishes of Ohio, when I came to 
New York to reside and began to form a geological museum at Columbia 
bid I 
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