TITE CHARACTERS OF THE FOSSIL PLANT GIGANTOP- 

 TERIS SCHENK AND ITS OCCURRENCE IN NORTH 

 AMERICA. 



By David White, 



Associate Curator, Division of Paleobotany, U. S. National Museum. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The name Gigantopteris has been appUed to a remarkable fernhke 

 plant from the "Lui-ho" coalfield in the province of Hu-Nan, in 

 south-central China, The specimens on which the genus was founded 

 were discovered in 1870 at the anthracite coal mines at Lui-Pa-Koii 

 by Baron F. von Richthofen, who, on account of the crushing throng 

 of natives actuated by mingled curiosit}^ and hostility, was able to 

 gather but a small number of fossils of any kind. The striking novelty 

 of the plant in question was at once recognized when, later, the collec- 

 tion was submitted to August Schenk, in Leipzig, who in 1883 de- 

 scribed ^ the fragmentary material. The name Megalopteris nico- 

 tiansefolia was given to the fossil on account of the evidently great 

 size of the leaf and the resemblance of the fragments to the leaves 

 of the cultivated tobacco plant. 



No other specimens of the kind were found in any other region or 

 collection until 1903, when a French engineer explorer, ^M. Counillon, 

 obtained a small lot of plant fragments from a coal field in the southern 

 part of the province of Yun-Nan, which lies in southwestern China, slop- 

 ing from the Himalaya ^fountains and forming the northeast border 

 of Upper Burma. These fragments were described in 1907 by Prof. 

 R. Zeiller,^ who regarded the flora as probably basal Triassic or 

 possibly uppermost Permian. Schenk, who, though a high authority 

 on Mesozoic plants, was hardly familiar with the Paleozoic floras, 

 had as the result, perhaps, of wrong identification of some of the 

 associated plants assigned the above-mentioned von Richthofen 

 collection to the "coal measures." Although the fragments placed 

 in Zeiller's hands were too small to throw much light on the nature 

 or characters of Schenk's plant, with which the Yun-Nan material 

 was specifically identified, they served to correct the nervation 



1 Von Richthofen, China, vol. 4, Berlin, 1SS3, pp. 211-2(;9, pis. 30-54. 



2 Annates des Mines, ser. 10, vol. 11, 1907, pp. 5-27, pi. 14. 



Proceedings U. S. National Museum, Vol. 41— No. 1873. 



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