Vol. 6, 1920 
GEOLGGY: E W. BERRY 
333 
FOSSIL PLANTS FROM THE LATE CRETACEOUS OF 
TENNESSEE 
By Edward W. Berry 
Geological Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University 
Communicated by Harry Fielding Reid, April 14, 1920 
That part of the Atlantic Coastal Plain known as the Mississippi Em- 
bayment is one of strategic paleobotanical interest. It is a region unac- 
quainted with orogenesis and remote from vulcanism, a region on the 
threshold as it were of the present-day tropics, far removed from glacia- 
tion, and with a relatively simple geological history. Hence the Gulf 
Coastal Plain affords a unique opportunity for studying the almost un- 
broken evolution of floras from the Cretaceous to the present. Many 
of these floras have been described in recent years, the two large unknown 
gaps in the record having been a knowledge of the later Upper Cretaceous 
and the Miocene floras. The latter still remains to be discovered, but 
information regarding the former will now be available through the for- 
tunate discoveries by Dr. Bruce Wade during the summer of 1919. In 
working near the boundary between the Coastal Plain and the Paleozoic 
rocks which form its margin and basement in western Tennessee several 
clay lenses with an abundant varied and well-preserved representation 
of the flora of the Ripley formation were discovered. The Ripley forma- 
tion is the latest Cretaceous known in this region and is overlain un- 
conf ormably by the basal Eocene. Its sediments, in general shallow water 
marine sands, with many suggestions of plants in their carbonaceous 
sdum have heretofore yielded but few and fragmentary representatives 
of the forests which clothed the shores of the Ripley sea — such things 
as leaves or broken twigs of Araucarian or other conifers, and a few of the 
more coriaceous dicotyledonous leaves that chanced to settle in its waters. 
The clay lenses in Henry and Carroll counties are of fine-grained and pure 
material, evidently the sediments of quiet estuarine or lagoonal waters 
close to a forested shore and perhaps the distributaries of slow streams or 
bayous traversing a richly forested country. The collected representa- 
tives of this flora contain some surprises in the survival of what have been 
considered earlier forms, and have an important bearing on correlation 
as well as affording a fair picture of the general facies. These considera- 
tions warrant a preliminary announcement. 
The most extensive best-preserved and earliest studied Upper Cretaceous 
floras, both in this country and abroad, have been those in the continental 
deposits immediately preceding, or in the initial deposits of the trans- 
gressing Upper Cretaceous sea, such for example as the Dakota sandstone 
of Kansas and Nebraska, the Raritan clays of New Jersey, the Perucer 
beds of Bohemia or the Niederschoena deposits of Saxony. Coming up- 
