DEVELOPMENT OF PALEOBOTANY IN THE ILLINOIS BASIN 39 



Canright has reported many coal- ball localities in the Indiana portion of 

 the basin (Canright, 1959). He wrote us: 



The most Impressive coal-ball find was associated with the Parker Goal of 

 Posey County (Andrews told me about the site). A huge calcified mass is 

 embedded in a creek bed near St. Wendel — roots of Psaronius are most abun- 

 dant and cellular details are beautifully preserved. 



William S. Benninghoff, who was an undergraduate assistant in Darrah's 

 lab at Harvard, earlier published a brief report of a coal-ball flora from Indiana's 

 Springfield Coal Member (V) (Benninghoff, 1942). A general discussion of some 

 of the plant genera in the coal balls from Indiana has been given by Judd and Nis- 

 bet (1969). 



The availability of calcareous coal balls for research and teaching in the 

 Illinois Basin is without parallel elsewhere in the United States, but a number of 

 coal-ball localities at several stratigraphic positions in the Pennsylvanian in 

 other states, principally Kansas, Iowa, and eastern Kentucky, have proved to be 

 of equal importance as complementary records of the morphological evolution of 

 the swamp plants, as are still older localities in western Europe. 



Along with the marked increase in coal-ball studies during the past two 

 decades, following Schopf ' s revisit to the basin, varying degrees of financial 

 support for paleobotanical studies at universities have been received from the 

 National Science Foundation, which was established in 1950. Grants for equip- 

 ment, supplies, field trips, and graduate student stipends, either directly from 

 the foundation or indirectly from graduate research boards or councils at the uni- 

 versities, allowed a number of institutions to establish paleobotanical research 

 for the first time or to increase research programs. 



Recent Contributions to Taxonomic Groups of Megafossils 



Since the reviews of Andrews (1951) and of Andrews and Mamay (1955), 

 paleobotany in the Illinois Basin and adjacent areas has contributed significantly 

 to most of the taxonomic groups of plants in the Illinois Basin. Least emphasis 

 has been on algae and the gymnospermous Cordaitales. The ontogenetic approach 

 to coal-ball studies has been one of the important contributions by paleobotanists 

 in the past two decades. The increased awareness of the diversity in most tax- 

 onomic groups has been a natural outgrowth of the increase in research from the 

 Illinois Basin. The studies of the ferns, Coenopteridales and Marattiales, are 

 among the most significant taxonomic achievements of the past 20 years. The con- 

 tributions of, roughly, the past two decades are cited following, according to tax- 

 onomic group. 



Early reports of fossil fungi penetrating vascular plant tissues in coal balls 

 were made by Coulter and Land (1911) and Andrews and Lenz (1943) . More recent 

 contributions by Aga she and Tilak (1970), Batra, Segal, and Baxter (19 64), Crid- 

 land (1962), and Dennis (1969a, 1970) have now established the presence of all 

 three major groups of fungi in Pennsylvanian coal balls. Baxter (1960) and Davis 

 and Leisman (19 62) studied the Sporooarpon- like bodies from the American Penn- 

 sylvanian . 



Highly significant ontogenetic studies in the morphology of arborescent 

 lycopods were made by Andrews and Murdy (1958), Arnold (1960), Eggert (1961), 

 Balbach (1962), Baxter (1965), Delevoryas (1967), and Ramanujam and Stewart 



