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Updated: June 16, 2025
The structure of the modern club-moss furnishes a complete explanation of the fossil remains of the Lepidodendra, and the fronds of some of the ancient ferns are hard to distinguish from existing ones. At the same time, it must be remembered, that there is nowhere in the world, at present, any forest which bears more than a rough analogy with a coal-forest.
I noticed, however that in the admirable printed information they supply to the public, they describe the trees as "at least several hundred thousand years old." There is no authority in the world who would grant less than ten million years since the Coal-forest period.
The revolutionary agency that broke into the comparatively even chronicle of life near the close of the Carboniferous period, dethroned its older types of organisms, and ushered new types to the lordship of the earth, was cold. The reader will begin to understand why I dwelt on the aspect of the Coal-forest and its surrounding waters.
They will, naturally, come with the flowers in the next great phase of organic life. But all the other orders of insects are represented, and many of our modern genera are fully evolved. The giant insects of the Coal-forest, with their mixed patriarchal features, have given place to more definite types.
Wherever a coal-field now exists, there must formerly have been free access for a great river, or for a shallow sea, bearing sediment in the shape of sand and mud. When the coal-forest area became slowly depressed, the waters must have spread over it, and have deposited their burden upon the surface of the bed of coal, in the form of layers, which are now converted into shale, or sandstone.
We can only say that it is probable that the Mosses, Ferns, Lycopods, etc., arose independently from the primitive level. But the higher and more important development is now much clearer. The Coal-forest is not simply a kingdom of Cryptogams. It is a world of aspiring and mingled types.
The structure of the modern club-moss furnishes a complete explanation of the fossil remains of the Lepidodendra, and the fronds of some of the ancient ferns are hard to distinguish from existing ones. At the same time, it must be remembered, that there is nowhere in the world, at present, any forest which bears more than a rough analogy with a coal-forest.
In the coal-forest period, and the age of trees and rank vegetation, insects of many kinds seem to have multiplied, even though the most beautiful of all were not yet launched in air. In England the first beetle wandered on to the stage of life the oldest British insect fossil known. It was discovered in the ironstone of Coalbrookdale, and was a kind of weevil.
The former seem to be more closely related to the Microsauria, or small salamander-like amphibia of the Coal-forest; the latter are nearer to the Labyrinthodonts. It is not suggested that these were their actual ancestors, but that they came from the same early amphibian root. We find both these groups, in patriarchal forms, in Europe, North America, and South Africa during the Permian period.
During that vast period there is no evidence whatever that the earth was divided into climatic zones, or that the year was divided into seasons. To such an earth was the prolific life of the Coal-forest adapted. It is, further, not questioned that the temperature of the earth fell in the latter part of the Carboniferous age, and that the cold reached its climax in the Permian.
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