YoL 68.] PAL.liOXTOLOGr OF THE WAKWICESHIRE COALFIELD. _615 



IV. PAL-EONTOLOGfT. 



With the exception of a few plants in the museum of the 

 Warwickshire IN'aturalists' Tield-Club at Warwick, there appears 

 to be no public collection of fossils from the coalfield. Records of 

 fossils are equally scarce, and in the most recent account of the palae- 

 ontology of the county by Mr. Lydekker (05) no Carboniferous fossils 

 are mentioned. This branch of the subject had thus remained a 

 virgin field for research, and in the following account I am con- 

 cerned solely with the fossils which I have myself collected during 

 the past three years. It is, however, necessar}'' to add that, since 

 this work was completed, a list of fossils from the Coal Measures 

 of Warwickshire has been published.^ These fossils, which were 

 collected and identified by Mr. A. R. Horwood, are restricted to 

 Middle Coal-Measure forms of plants and freshwater lamelli- 

 branchs, from the subdivisions of the Thick Coal worked in the 

 ■collieries of the neighbourhood of Nuneaton. 



Eossil horizons. — Each of the four subdivisions of the Coal 

 Measures — the Productive Measures, the Nuneaton Clays, the 

 Haunchwood Sandstones, and the Keele Beds — has yielded fossil 

 plants, and from the Productive Measures an extensive fauna has 

 been collected. Fossils have also been obtained from the Permian 

 deposits (see p. 607). 



In natural sections in the field, the rocks have invariably proved 

 to be barren of fossils, or else to contain only indeterminable frag- 

 ments. The whole of the flora and fauna about to be considered 

 has therefore been obtained from artificial sections, such as clay- 

 pits, colliery tip-heaps, and the cores from deep borings for coal. 



The nomenclature of the seams of coal is still somewhat confused, 

 :and so it is extremely probable that, in some cases, the same seam 

 has received distinct names at different collieries. As might 

 perhaps have been expected, the various subdivisions of the Thick 

 €oal — including the Four-Feet, Two-Yard, Ryder, Bare, Ell, and 

 Slate Coals — were found to constitute one palaeontological horizon, 

 from which the greater part of the Middle Coal-Measure flora, 

 together with most of the freshwater lamellibranchiata, has been 

 obtained. It will be seen from Table II (p. 617) that most of the 

 collieries work one or more of the divisions of the Thick Coal, 

 together with one or more of the lower seams ; and, as the resulting 

 debris of shale is thrown on the waste-heaps, it naturally becomes 

 mixed, so that it has not always been possible to refer each fossil to 

 its exact horizon. In most cases, it is a question of distinguishing 

 the debris of the Thick Coal from that of the Seven-Feet Coal ; and, as 

 the latter yields only a marine fauna, the problem of correlating fossils 

 with the seams from which they come is considerably simplified. 



The localities and stratigraphical horizons of each of the fossili- 

 ferous sections are stated in the following tables : — 



^ Rep. Brit. Assoc. (Portsmouth) 1911, p. 105. 



