DEVELOPMENT OF PALEOBOTANY IN THE ILLINOIS BASIN 17 



at the latter museum, and the displays of fossil plants at both. According to 

 Dahlgren (in Croneis, 1940), No£'s name was added to the botanical staff of the 

 Field Museum of Natural History as Research Associate in Paleobotany in recogni- 

 tion of his services. Dahlgren (1933, p. 12-13) also stated: 



A selected number of the most common and typical plants of the Pennsylva- 

 nian flora, especially as this is represented in the Middle Pennsylvanian 

 Series of Illinois and adjoining states to the east, has been restored to 

 three-dimensional form from the flattened impressions and casts in the 

 rocks which constitute the fossil record. So many of the fossils on which 

 these reconstructions are based are from Mazon Creek, Illinois, and of the 

 others so many are to be found there, that the group may be considered a 

 restoration of the Carboniferous vegetation of that famous locality, which 

 has yielded so much fossil material. 



The restoration of the Pennsylvanian forest in the Field Museum of Natural 

 History was completed in 1933 and still gives the best available picture of the 

 coal- forming forest. It is, however, partly a botanical garden of the ages rather 

 than a representation of a specific location of any one time. For instance, the older 

 plant Lyginopteris hoeninghausi , which does not occur in the Mazon Creek flora, 

 is included because when the exhibit was made Lyginopteris was the only mono- 

 stelicpterido sperm that could be reasonably reconstructed. Remarkably few Penn- 

 sylvanian plants are known in their entirety even today, and certain extrapolations 

 are necessary for completion of three-dimensional restorations. Two of the com- 

 mon smaller plants, Selaginella and Sphenophyllum % are shown in the restoration, 

 but coenopterid ferns, which occur abundantly in coal balls, were not well enough 

 known even from Europe to permit restorations. 



Noe's Studies 



Noe devoted much of his research to the flora of the Mazon Creek area 

 (fig. 2). From 1921 to 1925 and 1928 to 1936, Noe worked for the Illinois Geological 

 Survey during the summers, doing field work in coal geology and paleobotany. His 

 work with compression-impression fossils was stratigraphically oriented. Noe's 

 first manuscript on the Mazon Creek flora was sent to White for review in 1922 . 

 The benefit of White's interest and his 35 years of paleobotanical experience was 

 welcomed by Noe, although the criticism was rather severe and several taxonomic 

 determinations were questioned. White was incorrectly dubious about the large 

 number of species that Noe reported, but Noe accepted his advice calmly and, sub- 

 mitting to White's opinion, withheld the descriptions of new species. 



Noe's short statement (1922b) on the Braidwood flora in northeastern Illi- 

 nois indicated that it correlated with the upper part of the Westphalian or lower 

 part of the Stephanian in Europe (fig. 3). The Braidwood flora occurs just above 

 the Colchester (No. 2) Coal Member and is thus of the same age and identical to 

 the Mazon Creek floras of Wilmington and Coal City. In a short paper (1925b) 

 Noe correlated the Colchester Coal more distinctly with the Stephanian and the 

 "Ottweiler Schichten" in Germany, which is also of Stephanian age. An atlas of 

 the forms found in strata directly overlying the Colchester Coal in northern Illinois 

 was published the same year (Noe, 1925a). Following its publication Noe* ex- 

 pressed his intent and plans to Leighton in a 1925 letter, "I have withheld new 

 species from the paper on the fossil flora of Northern Illinois because all of my 



