This is Mazon Monday post #38. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
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Recently, I ran across this interesting paper from the journal Acta Palaeobotanica back in 2012. It's called "Carboniferous plants preserved within sideritic nodules – a remarkable state of preservation providing a wealth of information" by Grzegorz Pacyna and Danuta Zdebska of the Department of Palaeobotany and Palaeoherbarium, Institute of Botany, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland.
ABSTRACT. Fossil plants preserved within sidertitic nodules have been known from Europaean and North American Carboniferous coal measures since the early 19th Century. However, only a few of them have been described thoroughly palaeobotanically, mainly in the 19th and early 20th centuries; thus their taxonomy often requires revision. Animal fossils preserved within sidertitic nodules beside plant fossils became a base of the description of many rare new taxa of animals undiscovered in other modes of preservation. Published hitherto works about such preserved flora indicate that plants preserved within concretions represent rare taxa, not known in other modes of preservation. The dissimilarities in composition of floras preserved in ironstone concretions when compared to those from surrounding sediments likely results from the process of concretion formation which selectively influences the preservation of small, delicate plant organs. The most famous fl oras preserved within concretions come from Mazon Creek in the USA and Coseley in Great Britain. These localities were the source of many previously unknown taxa with important evolutionary significance. The new flora preserved within concretions has been discovered recently in Poland in Sosnowiec (Upper Silesia). It contains new, hitherto unknown taxa particularly plant reproductive organs. Comparison of the taxonomy and taphonomy of the ironstone concretion flora from Sosnowiec with other similar assemblages from the Carboniferous of Europe and North America has reveals many similarities stemming from a common mode of preservation. Due to the exceptional three-dimensional preservation of the plant fossils, in particular reproductive organs key to the understanding of evolutionary relationships, the locality at Sosnowiec can be regarded as an important new Lagerstätte, and the first such site recognized in Poland. The use of pioneering techniques in high-resolution X-ray microtomography promises to yield yet further information on the biota of this new locality.
KEYWORDS: plant fossils preserved within sideritic nodules, Upper Carboniferous, Sosnowiec, Coseley, Mazon Creek, FossilLagerstätten, Konservat-Lagerstätten
The paper is a survey of Pennsylvanian sideritic localities. There is a history and description of each site with a discussion of similarities and differences between the localities. The following list are sites discussed with a concentration on the Sosnowiec, Poland site.
- Mazon Creek / Francis Creek Shale, Will and Grundy County, IL, 307 mya
- Energy Shale, Carterville and Georgetown, IL., 306.5 mya
- Mansfield formation, Pike County, IN., 315-320 mya
- Chieftain No. 20 Flora / Dugger Formation, Vigo County, IN., 305.5 mya
- Stanley Cemetery Flora / Brazil Formation, Green and Vigo County, IN., 313 mya
- Dunerath, IA
- Knob Noster, Missouri, Knob Noster, MO., 309 mya
- Windsor, Missouri
- Okmulgee, Henryetta and Morris, Okmulgee, OK., 309 mya
- Sallisaw, Oklahoma (Undescribed)
- Crockhey, United Kingdom, 315 mya
- Coseley, United Kingdom, ~300 mya
- Bickershaw, United Kingdom, 313 - 304 mya (Westphalian, Upper Carboniferous)
- Foord Seam Shale, Stellarton Basin, Nova Scotia, Canada, 313 - 304 mya (Westphalian, Upper Carboniferous)
- Sosnowiec, Poland, 313 - 304 mya (Westphalian, Upper Carboniferous)
- Montceau-les-Mines, France, 313 - 304 mya (Westphalian, Upper Carboniferous)
The dates above come from the Mazon Monday #5 post. In that, we referenced a paper by Baird, Sroka, and Shabica in 1985, entitled "Mazon Creek-Type Fossil Assemblages in the U.S. Midcontinent Pennsylvanian". It did not have any discussion of sites in Europe.
There isn't much information on the web about the site in Poland, but I did find a Polish geology blog that seems to be about the site at Sosnowiec.
Pictures of fossils from Sosnowiec are somewhat scarce on the web. However, there are some and they look very familiar.
