NOTES AND LITERATUEE 



THE COAL MEASURES AMPHIBIA OF NORTH 

 AMERICA^ 



The excellent monograph by Dr. Roy L. Moodie is a worthy 

 successor of the long series of works by Dawson and by Cope on 

 the air-breathing vertebrates of the Coal Period in North 

 America. The extremely varied amphibian fauna of the coal 

 swamps as described by Moodie contains representatives of no 

 less than 7 orders, 19 families, 46 genera and 88 species, the 

 animals ranging in size from the minute Eumicrerpeton, less 

 than two inches long, to the great Leptophractus ohsoletus, 

 which was as large as an adult Florida alligator. The wide dif- 

 ferentiation and high specialization of these amphibians shows 

 that the class even at that early epoch had evolved very far from 

 its first adaptive radiation, so that, as Dr. Moodie well observes, 

 the origin of land vertebrates from fishes must be looked for in a 

 much earlier time, perhaps the Silurian. 



Carboniferous Amphibia are reported from various localities 

 in North America, but only four of these have yielded large or 

 important collections. From the South Joggins coal mines in 

 Nova Scotia Sir William Dawson secured most of the specimens 

 of Microsaurs described by him, many of the skeletons being 

 found m the rotten stumps of SigiUaria. trees. This material is 

 preserved chiefly in the Museum at McGill University, Montreal. 

 From the Linton, Ohio, coal seams Newberry and his collectors 

 secured the great collections described by Cope and which are 

 now chiefly in the American Museum of Natural History. At 

 Mazon Creek, Illinois, the fossils are found in ironstone nodules 

 in a stratum of shale ; the specimens have been described chiefly 

 by Newberry, Cope and Moodie and are scattered in various 

 n s At Cannelton, Pennsylvania, the fossils occur in slates 



and have been described by Moodie, the material being in the 

 National Museum. 



On account of the fragmentary nature of most of the material 

 and tlie fact that generic and specific lunncs have been based on 



311 



