TITE CHARACTERS OF THE FOSSIL PLANT GIGANTOP-TERIS SCHENK AND ITS OCCURRENCE IN NORTH AMERICA. By David White, Associate Curator, Division of Paleobotany, U. S. National Museum. INTRODUCTION. The name Gigantopteris has been appUed to a remarkable fernhke plant from the "Lui-ho" coalfield in the province of Hu-Nan, in south-central China, The specimens on which the genus was founded were discovered in 1870 at the anthracite coal mines at Lui-Pa-Koii by Baron F. von Richthofen, who, on account of the crushing throng of natives actuated by mingled curiosit}^ and hostility, was able to gather but a small number of fossils of any kind. The striking novelty of the plant in question was at once recognized when, later, the collec-tion was submitted to August Schenk, in Leipzig, who in 1883 de-scribed ^ the fragmentary material. The name Megalopteris nico-tiansefolia was given to the fossil on account of the evidently great size of the leaf and the resemblance of the fragments to the leaves of the cultivated tobacco plant. No other specimens of the kind were found in any other region or collection until 1903, when a French engineer explorer, ^M. Counillon, obtained a small lot of plant fragments from a coal field in the southern part of the province of Yun-Nan, which lies in southwestern China, slop-ing from the Himalaya ^fountains and forming the northeast border of Upper Burma. These fragments were described in 1907 by Prof. R. Zeiller,^ who regarded the flora as probably basal Triassic or possibly uppermost Permian. Schenk, who, though a high authority on Mesozoic plants, was hardly familiar with the Paleozoic floras, had as the result, perhaps, of wrong identification of some of the associated plants assigned the above-mentioned von Richthofen collection to the "coal measures." Although the fragments placed in Zeiller's hands were too small to throw much light on the nature or characters of Schenk's plant, with which the Yun-Nan material was specifically identified, they served to correct the nervation 1 Von Richthofen, China, vol. 4, Berlin, 1SS3, pp. 211-2(;9, pis. 30-54. 2 Annates des Mines, ser. 10, vol. 11, 1907, pp. 5-27, pi. 14. Proceedings U. S. National Museum, Vol. 41— No. 1873. 493
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