This is Mazon Monday post #166. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
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June 1963 saw the first copies of George Langford's second book "The Wilmington Coal Fauna and Additions to the Wilmington Coal Flora From a Pennsylvanian Deposit in Will County, Illinois". This book detailed the animals of Mazon Creek and added a few plants missing in the first book. Both books were published by Esconi Associates.
The membership was excited as evidenced by four interesting outtakes in the May 1963 edition of the newsletter. The outtakes interspersed with the other text of the newsletter were similar in character to the old highway signs from Burma Shave.
The cover shown above is for the "gold bound" edition, which were autographed. An advertisement for the this book and the first edition appeared in the back of the July/August 1963 edition of the ESCONI newsletter.
Here is the introduction to the book, written by George Langford.
INTRODUCTION
In a previous volume (Langford, 1958) I brought together illustrations and brief descriptive comments of the fossil plants commonly found in concretions in a Middle Pennsylvanian shale in and near Wilmington Township, Will County, Illinois. In this volume I present illustrations and discussion of the animals and additional plants from the same bed, the Francis Creek shale.
The fauna includes many kinds of aquatic animals, most of them inhabiting the fresh water of a coal swamp or forested delta, but including also a few that lived nearby in the salt water of an inland sea. The swamp or delta animals include clams, ostracodes, shrimp-like crustaceans, horseshoe crabs, worms, eurypterids and fishes. In puddles and damp places, perhaps under rotting leaves like their present day relatives, were myriapods with tiny jointed legs, soft naked worms, tiny coiled tube-building worms, and the great rarities: small amphibians and the largest animal of them all, Arthropleura, an invertebrate about five feet long. Offshore, in the salt or brackish water, lived scallops, tube-building worms, fishes, and a few rarer forms.
Animals of the dry land and air are less readily preserved, but in this same deposit there are many, including winged insects, scorpions, spider-like arachnids and (rather doubtfully) a caterpillar.
Although reptiles had evolved by Middle Pennsylvanian time, we have found none in the Francis Creek shale. Insects were the most varied of all the groups, 137 species having been recorded, most of them from the same bed where it outcrops in the banks of Mazon Creek a few miles to the west, in Grundy County.
While the fauna and flora of the Francis Creek shale exposed on Mazon Creek have made the name of that locality known the world over, I have used the designation "Wilmington Fauna" in this book, as I used "Wilmington Flora" in the previous one, because this is essentially a record of the fossils that I have collected and worked with; over a period of some 50 years I have secured the greater part of my material from Wilmington Township. The specimens I collected are deposited in Chicago Natural History Museum, Illinois State Museum, Peabody Museum of Yale University, and St. Paul Academy of Science. The illustrations in this book are chiefly from specimens in the first two of these institutions.
George Langford
The ESCONI guides and Jack Wittry's books have done much to update the science of Mazon Creek since the Langford books were published. However, the books are more than interesting historical documents. They contain some very nice artwork and clear photos of specimens.
