(n) The Linton, Ohio, beds outcropped near Linton post-office, which was formerly located at the mouth of Yellow Creek, a few hundred yards from the present station, Yellow Creek, Salem Township, Jefferson County, in the valley of Yellow Creek, near the Ohio River, and thus near the Pennsylvania state line.
In regard to the exact location of the town of Linton, which has long since been abandoned, I quote from a letter from Dr. Louis Hussakof, who visited the locality:
"The locality appears to have been known as Yellow Creek for many years past. That is the name used in the Geological Map of Ohio published by Orton in 1888 and which was based on the earlier maps of Newberry (1869 and 1879). When I visited the place in 1905, and asked for Linton (which I had not been able to locate on any map then available to me), hardly anyone knew of such a locality. Only one old man in Steubenville, Ohio, recalled that Yellow Creek was identical with Linton.
"Yellow Creek is not a village, but only a R. R. station (on the Pennsylvania R. R.), and marks a spot where once was an active and prosperous mine. Probably at a former day there was a small post-office somewhere in the neighborhood known as Linton. I did not take any photographs, as I was not certain of the spot, or the mine, from which the fossils had come. There are some cement mines within a few minutes' walk of the station, but no coal appears to be mined at present at Yellow Creek. 'Smith's Pit,' the coal mine best remembered by the younger men, is not worked.
"Now as to the question whether some of the Amphibia might have come from localities in Columbiana County. I believe it very probable that they did. I walked along the road from Yellow Creek (Jefferson County) to Wellsville (Columbiana County), a distance of about 2 or 2.5 miles, and the country seemed quite the same. Everywhere one sees outcrops of coal in the cuts along the road. Furthermore, I inclose a copy of a page in an old notebook of Professor Newberry from which you will see that Coal Measure fossil localities were known not only at Yellow Creek, but also from near Wellsville. There can be hardly a doubt that most of the specimens you have are from Yellow Creek; and quite a number are those collected by Sam Huston."
Newberry says, in regard to the fauna of the Linton Coal:
"The Linton locality is especially interesting and instructive. It has already (1889) yielded more than 20 species of fishes and nearly 40 species of aquatic amphibians, all inhabitants of the same body of water. These were found in a thin stratum of cannel which, over a limited area, underlies a thick bed of cubical coal (No. 6 of the Ohio reports), of which the place is near the top of the Lower Coal Measures. At Linton, ... we have evidence that the great marsh in which the peat accumulated that formed coal No. 6 was for a time a lake or a lagoon, inhabited by the fishes and amphibians to which I have referred.... Many of the fishes and the amphibians were highly carnivorous and powerful, as we learn from their teeth and coprolites. The largest of the amphibians must have been 8 or 10 feet in length, having strong jaws, set with numerous lancet-shaped teeth an inch or more in length.... After a sufficient time had elapsed for many generations of fishes and aquatic salamanders to live and die, the lake was filled by the extension of its peaty shores into it just as so many lakelets are filled and obliterated at the present time and afterward over the cannel was formed a mass of peat, which has now become a stratum of cubical coal 7 feet in thickness.
"In the Linton cannel are buried fragments or entire individuals of all the inhabitants of this body of water which had hard parts, bones, scales, spines, or teeth, capable of preservation. Hence we get a locally complete picture of the life of the Carboniferous age, and we find it to be unexpectedly rich and varied. In that age fishes and amphibians were the highest forms of animal life, and the amphibians were comparatively newcomers on the earth's surface. Yet they had multiplied and differentiated until this little pool contained millions of them, varying in length from 6 inches to 10 feet and curiously diversified in their forms, their scales, and spines, and in the ornamentation of their enamel-covered heads" ([498]).
"To the paleontologist there are few places in the world more interesting than the Diamond mine, at Linton, since here we get such a view of the life of the Carboniferous age as is afforded almost nowhere else, and of the great numbers of species found there, not more than three or four have been met with elsewhere" ([497]).
On page 18 is a list of the Amphibia which are thus far described from the Linton deposits. They all belong, so far as known, to the Microsauria, the reference of any of the species to other orders being doubtful. The larger Amphibia seem to be indicated by a large rib which resembles very much that described by Huxley in 1863 for Anthracosaurus.