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89
89 Stumps of Eospermatopterisfrom Riverside Quarry collected by Miss Goldring now forming
an exhibit outside the town hall at Gilboa.
had collected from a disused quarry on the
New York bank of the Delaware. They
concluded that the foliage and sporangia
of the New York material were indeed
Aneurophyton
, but the foliage could not
be linked directly with the stumps. Though
commonly found with the stumps, the
association could be ecological rather than
anatomical. In paleobotany, different parts
of the plant receive different names when
they are described separately; it is not until
somebody proves that were attached in life
that one name can be subsumed under the
other (the earliest name takes priority).
The mystery was solved by Stein
et al
.
(2007) who described a spectacular
specimen
University. A monograph on the lycopods
(club-mosses) of New York was produced by
Banks and his student James D Grierson
(Grierson and Banks, 1963). Riverside
Quarry was a particularly good locality
for club-mosses. The site has yielded
two genera of herbaceous club-mosses
(
Gilboaphyton
and
Protolepidodendron
)
and three arborescent forms
(
Amphidoxodendron
,
Sigillaria
, and
Lepidosigillaria
), as well as the progymno-
sperm
Aneurophyton
and four genera
belonging to enigmatic plant groups
(
Eospermatopteris
,
Pseudosporochnus
,
Ibyka
, and
Prosseria
) (Berry and Fairon-
Demaret, 2001). These are described later.
Another locality which has yielded not
only fossil plants, but animals as well, is
known as Brown Mountain. As New York
city grew, its appetite not only for water
but also for electric power grew with it. In
1968 the New York Power Authority was
given permission to create a pumped-
of
Eospermatopteris
with
cladoxylopsid fronds (see later).
Through the middle and later parts of
the twentieth century, there was an active
group of paleobotanists researching the
fossil flora of the Devonian rocks of new
York, headed by Harlan P Banks of Cornell
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