Fossil Wood from the Western Territories of Canada ¹

Abstract

SILICIFIED wood occurs in the country west of Manitoba in the Upper Cretaceous beds, in the Laramie and in the Miocene of the Cypress Hills, and has found its way into the drift. The numerous specimens in our collections, picked up on the plains, are thus of little palæontological value, as their sources are uncertain, and it has become desirable to obtain specimens found in situ. A small collection of this kind was made by Dr. G. M. Dawson in the course of the Boundary Survey, and was described in the Report on the 49th Parallel, in 1875. In 1880, Schrœter, in an appendix to Heer's paper on the plants of Mackenzie River, described a few species from the Laramie of that district. More recently, numerous specimens have been collected from beds of known geological age by Dr. G. M. Dawson, Mr. J. B. Tyrrell, and Mr. T. C. Weston, of the Geological Survey, and slices have been prepared by the latter. They include species from the Belly River and Fort Pierre groups, which are Upper Cretaceous; from the Lower Laramie, apparently a transition group between the Cretaceous and Eocene; and from the Upper Laramie, which is probably Lower Eocene, though at one time regarded as Miocene. These woods are mostly coniferous, but there are also angiospermous exogens of several kinds. In describing them in detail, they are not named as species, but merely referred to the modern genera which they most closely resemble. We thus find in the Belly River series two types of Sequoia corresponding to the wood of the two modern species, and woods of the types of Taxus Salisburia or Ginkgo, Thuja, and possibly Abies, along with exogens referable conjecturally to the genera Betula, Populus, Carya, Ulnius, and Platanus. In the Laramie we have a similar assemblage of conifers and exogens, with forms referable to Pinus and Abies, and to Juglans and Acer among the exogens. Some fruits and other fragments from the Belly River series appear to indicate the presence of a species of Podocarpus. Appended to the descriptions of the woods are notices of new species and localities in connexion with the Laramie flora, and remarks on the grand coniferous fruits of the period, as connected with the formation of coal and lignite. The concluding remarks are given in full, as of interest in connexion with the British Eocene flora:—