CHAPTEE XXI. 



FOSSIL FEENS. 

 Osmundaceae. 



From the Culm of Silesia, Stur^ described impressions of 

 sterile fronds which he named Todea Lipoldi on the ground of 

 the similarity of the finely divided pinnules to those of Todea 

 superba and other filmy species of the genus. The type- 

 specimen of Stur (in the Geological Survey Museum, Vienna) 

 affords no information as to sporangial characters and cannot be 

 accepted as an authentic record of a Lower Carboniferous 

 representative of the family. Another more satisfactory but 

 hardly convincing piece of evidence bearing on the presence of 

 Osmundaceae in pre-Permian floras has been adduced by 

 Renault^ who described petrified sporangia from the Culm 

 beds of Esnost in France as Todeopsis primaeva (fig. 256, F). 

 These pyriform sporangia are characterised by the presence of 

 a plate of large cells comparable with the subapical group of 

 " annulus " cells in the sporangia of the recent species (fig. 221). 



Zeiller' has published a figure of some sporangia described 

 by Renault from Autun resembling the Osmundaceous type in 

 having a plate of thick-walled cells instead of a true annulus, 

 but the plate is larger than the group of cells in the recent 

 sporangia, and both sporangia and spores are smaller in the 

 fossil. The sporangia from Carboniferous rocks described by 

 Weiss as Sturiella * bear some resemblance to those of recent 



1 Stur (75) A. p. 77, PI. xi. fig. 8. 2 Benault (96) A. p. 21. 



3 ZeiUer (90) p. 16. ^ Zeiller (90) p. 48. 



