A W. Berry — Fruits of a Date Palm. 403 



Art. XXXIII. — Fruits of a Date Palm in the Tertiary 

 Deposits of Eastern Texas / by Edward W. Beery. 



So much study and experiment have been devoted to making 

 practical the cultivation of the date palm in the hot arid south- 

 west* that the recent discovery of the fossil fruits of a species 

 of date palm in the Tertiary of eastern Texas is of exceptional 

 interest. 



The considerable range of species of Phoenix-like palms in 

 the south European Tertiary has led to the expectation of their 

 discovery in our more tropical southern Tertiaries when these 

 should have been thoroughly explored, just as the Bread-fruit, 

 Cinnamon tree and Nipapalm have been found ; nevertheless, 

 the actual finding of proof of the former existence of a date 

 palm in the Western Hemisphere is one of the more spectacu- 

 lar incidents of the paleobotanists' work, since it is likely to 

 attract more attention from botanists and geologists engrossed 

 in their own special lines of study than a tome of admirable 

 descriptive paleobotanical work. In order that the presence 

 of the date palm in the American Tertiary may not remain 

 unknown until my monographic studies of our southern Ter- 

 tiary floras are published, which will be a number of years 

 hence, I am prompted to publish the present brief note. 



In the course of my studies for the U. S. Geological Survey 

 and under the supervision of Dr. T. Wayland Yaughan, I have 

 had the good fortune to receive collections of fossil plants from 

 eastern Texas made under the direction of the veteran geolo- 

 gist, E. T. Dumble, now associated with the Southern Pacific 

 Company. The material on which the following note is based 

 was collected by Chas. Laurence Baker in Trinity county, 

 Texas, and while not abundant contains both large and small 

 seeds and a cast of the entire fruit of a new species of Phoenix- 

 like palm which may with propriety be referred to Brong- 

 niart's genus Phoenicites. I propose to call this species Phoe- 

 nicites occidentalis, It may be described as follows : Fruit, as 

 preserved in a coarse gray sandstone, an oblate spheroid about 

 4 cm in length by l*5 cm in breadth. The surface is longitudinally 

 wrinkled, due possibly to desiccation before preservation, which 

 may also make the dimensions as given probably under what 

 they were in life. The flesh was relatively thin compared 

 with that of the cultivated elate and must have been of consid- 

 erable consistency and fibrous rather than of the soft and 

 almost fluid character of some of the modern varieties of the 

 latter. The seed was relatively large — in the above mentioned 

 specimen it is rounded at both ends, about 3 cm in length, 



* Swingle, Bull. 53, Bureau of Plant Industry, Washington, 1904. 



