American Cretaceous Flora

Abstract

IN several of the interesting and valuable papers on the Tertiary flora which Mr. J. Starkie Gardner has contributed to the English journals he has referred to the fossil plants in our Cretaceous rocks as representing a flora really Tertiary in character; and, influenced by the modern aspect of the plants contained in our Dakota group (Lower Cretaceous), he has expressed a doubt whether even that should be regarded as truly of Cretaceous age. In a former number of NATURE I endeavoured to show that our Dakota flora was Cretaceous, inasmuch as it is found in rocks which are overlain by several thousand feet of strata containing many mollusks, fishes, and reptiles which are everywhere recognised as Cretaceous, and none that are Tertiary.