Abstract
MANCHESTER. Literary and Philosophical Society, October 7.—Miss Laura Start: The significance of some Iban textile designs.—J. Walton: On the existence of liverworts as fossils in the Carboniferous rocks of England. Dr. Lucy Wills has described some small dichotomously branched thalloid plants in shales of Upper Coal Measure Age in Staffordshire and suggested that they might possibly be fragments of a Bryophyte. Some clayey shale from the Middle Coal Measures of the Denbighshire coal-field yielded thalloid plants of a similar type of organisation, some with rhizoids attached. In addition, two fragments of a plant which cannot be other than a foliose liverwort were isolated by treatment of the same shale. This latter plant is distinctly dorsiventral. There are two rows of leaves, one on each side of the somewhat stout axial part of the shoot. The members of the two series alternate. On the under (or the upper?) surface of the axial part are two rows of smaller leaf-like appendages, each in definite relation to one of the larger leaves and lying close to it. Thus it is now clear that there were both thalloid and foliose forms of liverworts in existence in Carboniferous times.
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Societies and Academies. Nature 114, 594–596 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/114594b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/114594b0