36 ILLINOIS STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY CIRCULAR 480 



Major Coal-Ball Localities 



Most of the significant coal-ball localities (fig. 4) in the Illinois Basin 

 have been discovered in active strip mines, and paleobotanists have become a- 

 ware of them through the cooperation of the coal miners, operators, and the geo- 

 logical surveys. The Illinois Geological Survey has continued the search for coal 

 balls, begun by Noe, during most of the past 50 years, and collections have been 

 made by field parties from many new mining operations or areas. As a result, coal 

 balls were collected from numerous mines and mining areas that are no longer open 

 for paleobotanical collecting. 



Two significant coal-ball horizons in the McLeansboro Group of the Illi- 

 nois Basin are the Calhoun Coal Member in Richland County, Illinois, and the Par- 

 ker Coal Member of the Patoka Formation near St. Wend el (now spelled St. Wen- 

 dells), Indiana. The best known localities for each are in the beds and banks of 

 creeks on farms where the thin coal seams were not commercially mined. Discov- 

 ery of and/ or stratigraphic determination for both coals are credited to J.Marvin 

 Weller. Some of the Calhoun coal-ball localities are known as Berryville, Cal- 

 houn- North, or New Calhoun. Schopf wrote concerning two of these: 



It must have been about 1937 that Marvin Weller brought me a few small 

 sample sacks of material he had collected in a creek bed in Richland 

 County. The material consisted of weathered out and remarkably well-pre- 

 served examples of coal-ball type Psaronius roots. There was no trouble 

 finding the big limy lens where the creek had nearly worn through. This 

 became the Berryville locality. 



The Calhoun- North locality was discovered by Harold R. Wanless, distinguished 

 Pennsylvanian stratigrapher of the University of Illinois, and Donald L. Carroll, 

 Educational Extension geologist of the Illinois Geological Survey, while on a field 

 trip in the Calhoun vicinity (Schopf, 1938c). Schopf related that Carroll: 



...came into my office with a story of a big mass of coal balls he had 

 found a few miles from Berryville. Operators of a small limestone quarry 

 above a thin coal bed had decided to get out some coal. They got an entry 

 back a little way and ran into something hard. It must have been a lot of 

 work getting it loose, but they had a winch outside and attached a cable 

 and brought it out and dumped it on the ledge on top, It was about five 

 feet long. There wasn't any other fossil material around the mine en- 

 trance, which was flooded with water from the quarry, so we broke this 

 one block up into pieces small enough to load in the truck. This was my 

 Calhoun-North locality. If they ever open up the quarry to expose the 

 coal again, this should be marvelous collecting. Former strip mines had 

 worked the Calhoun Coal a few miles to the south and Noe had earlier ob- 

 tained some coal balls from that locality. 



But the thing that greatly impressed me about the aggregate we got 

 at the Calhoun-North quarry was a number of peculiar lycopod cones, and a 

 number of structures I could identify with Dolerotheca [Schopf, 1948a]. 

 There also were at least a half dozen beautifully preserved stems of 

 Psaronius , big specimens of Medullosa noei , Alethopteris leaves, lots of 

 lycopsid cortex, and many roots. I am still not sure that it is the same 

 coal bed as that at Berryville, but I suspect it is. I did the Mazocarpon 

 paper first, incorporating in It some stratigraphic notes from a paper I 

 presented In 19-40 in Milwaukee [Schopf, 194 lb]. 



The "stratigraphic notes" contained in Schopf s paper on Mazocarpon oedip- 

 ternum (1941b) presented the first and still the most detailed consideration of the 



