30 ILLINOIS STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY CIRCULAR 480 



working on the systematics of some of the Hawaiian flora. My interests at 

 this time were mainly concerned with the morphology and taxonomy of living 

 vascular plants. However, World War II broke out about this time and, when 

 I finally got out of the Navy in 194-6 and decided to return to Washington 

 University to complete graduate work, Henry Andrews was very helpful and 

 cooperative so that I felt fortunate in being accepted by him to complete 

 my work for my master's. . .by that time I was so hooked on "coal ball" 

 fossil plants that I continued on with a thesis on pteridosperms and a 

 Ph.D. in 1949. 



At the University of Kansas, where Baxter later served as Chairman of the Botany- 

 Department, he began to study coal-ball plants from Kansas (Baxter, 1951a; Bax- 

 ter and Hornbaker, 1965; Leisman, 1968). He also described a beautifully pre- 

 served fern, Ankyropteris glabra 3 collected from the Springfield Coal Member (V) 

 of the Petersburg Formation at the Was son Coal Mining Corporation near Boonville, 

 Indiana (Baxter, 1951b). Andrews (1956) further added to the variation in ana- 

 tomy of Ankyropteris . 



Baxter's classmate, Sergius H. Mamay, contributed significantly to our 

 knowledge of fossil ferns, particularly those from the Illinois Basin. His doctoral 

 thesis on American Carboniferous fern fructifications (Mamay, 1950) has served 

 as a basic reference for later studies on marattiaceous and coenopterid fructifica- 

 tions. He, with Andrews, first discovered the main rhizome system of the common 

 Permo- Carboniferous fern Botryopteris at the Berryville locality in the Calhoun 

 Coal (Mamay and Andrews, 1950) . They also described a new species of Bowman- 

 ites (Andrews and Mamay, 1951). 



Andrews and Mamay (1952) wrote and illustrated a brief synopsis of Amer- 

 ican coal-ball studies, which deals with many of the practical aspects of coal- 

 ball paleobotany. The taxonomic groups represented were discussed by Andrews 

 and Mamay in 1955. Mamay went to Cambridge as a Guggenheim Fellow, where 

 he studied Tubioaulis (Mamay, 1952). The many peels of petrified plants from 

 English coal balls and calciferous sandstone material from Scotland that he col- 

 lected were thus made available for teaching in this country. Excellent teaching 

 material from English coal balls also was obtained by Darrah when he purchased 

 choice specimens from J. Lomax, who had supplied a number of English paleo- 

 botanists with coal-ball preparations before he discontinued his business. Upon 

 returning to the United States, Mamay joined the U. S. Geological Survey. He 

 later described (1957) the zygopterid fructification Biscalitheoa from Berryville 

 (Calhoun Coal) and co-authored a comprehensive study on the nature of coal balls 

 (Mamay and Yochelson, 1953, 1962). 



Charles J. Felix, who also studied under Andrews, turned to palynology 

 after completing his graduate work on coal-ball lycopods (Felix, 1952, 1954), in 

 which he gave the first description of Lepidostrobus diversus , from the Spring- 

 field Coal Member (V) ("Petersburg coal") near Boonville, Indiana. Felix worked 

 two years (1954-1956) with Schopf at the U.S. Geological Survey Coal Geology 

 Laboratory in Columbus, Ohio, and then joined Sun Oil Production Research Lab- 

 oratory at Richardson, Texas. 



A later student of Andrews (jointly advised by Edgar Anderson) was William 

 H. Murdy of Emory University, who studied corn anatomy for a thesis but contrib- 

 uted significantly to papers with Andrews on Botryopteris (Murdy and Andrews, 1957) 

 and the classic, Lepidophloios — and Ontogeny in Arborescent Lyoopods (Andrews 

 and Murdy, 1958), in which the concept of determinate vegetative growth in lyco- 

 pod trees was first presented. 



