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Updated: May 2, 2025
One striking feature in connection with the fruit of the lepidodendron and other ancient representatives of the club-moss tribe, is that the bituminous coals in many, if not in most, instances, are made up almost entirely of their spores and spore-cases.
The SIGILLARIA, or "seal tree," was similar to the Lepidodendron, but its fluted trunk divided into even fewer branches, and was dotted with vertical rows of leaf scars, like the impressions of a seal. Both Lepidodendron and Sigillaria were anchored by means of great cablelike underground stems, which ran to long distances through the marshy ground.
The branches and stem of this plant are not yet certainly known, but there is no sort of doubt that it was closely allied to the Lepidodendron, the remains of which abound in the coal formation.
Get the passive student once into palæozoology, and he takes your other hard names your ichthyodorulite, trogontherium, lepidodendron, and bothrodendron for granted, contemplating them, indeed, with a kind of religious awe or devotional reverence.
If one of these submarine forest beds should be gradually depressed and covered up by new deposits, it would present just the same characters as an under-clay of the coal, if the Sigillaria and Lepidodendron of the ancient world were substituted for the oak, or the beech, of our own times.
Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the gigantic fern-like trees, the Sigillaria and Lepidodendron, whose petrified trunks, for aeons buried beneath the deposit of the Permian seas, and then, during other aeons, slowly uncovered by the gentle action of the eroding rains, we saw scattered on the ground.
In the ancient Lepidodendron, on the other hand, the more ancient the scale of the leaf-stalk, the more apparent it still remains.
We have remarked above that the portions of Lepidodendron analyzed belonged to that part of the bark that was considerably thickened and lignefied. So too the portion of the Megaphyton that was submitted to distillation was the external part of the hard bark, formed of hypodermic fibers and traversed by small roots.
We have seen elsewhere what it is in the dust which makes it dangerous, how that, for the most part, it consists of the dust-like spores of the lepidodendron tree, fine and impalpable as the spores on the backs of some of our living ferns, and the fact that this consists of a large proportion of resin makes it the easily inflammable substance it is.
The portions of coal that contain impressions of the bark of Sigillaria and Lepidodendron allow the elongated, suberose tissue characteristic of such bark to be still more clearly seen.
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