Life of the Carboniferous
| Fig. 305. Carboniferous Ferns | Fig. 306. Calamites |
Plants. The gloomy forests and dense undergrowths of the Carboniferous jungles would appear unfamiliar to us could we see them as they grew, and even a botanist would find many of their forms perplexing and hard to classify. None of our modern trees would meet the eye. Plants with conspicuous flowers of fragrance and beauty were yet to come. Even mosses and grasses were still absent.
Ferns we should recognize at once by their delicate fronds with the spore cases underneath, and a botanist would notice that certain species belong to families which still exist. As at the present, some were lowly herbaceous plants, and some were tree ferns, lifting their crown of feathery fronds high in the air on trunks of woody tissue.
Dense thickets, like cane or bamboo brakes, were composed of thick clumps of Calamites, whose slender, jointed stems shot up to a height of forty feet, and at the joints bore slender branches set with whorls of leaves. These were close allies of the Equiseta or “horsetails,” of the present; but they bore characteristics of higher classes in the woody structures of their stems.
There were also vast monotonous forests, composed chiefly of trees belonging to the lycopods, and whose nearest relatives to-day are the little club mosses of our eastern woods. Two families of lycopods deserve special mention,—the Lepidodendrons and the Sigillaria.
| Fig. 308. Sigillaria | Fig. 307. Lepidodendron |
The Lepidodendron, or “scale tree,” was a gigantic club moss fifty and seventy-five feet high, spreading toward the top into stout branches, at whose ends were borne cone-shaped spore cases. The younger parts of the tree were clothed with stiff needle-shaped leaves, but elsewhere the trunk and branches were marked with scalelike scars, left by the fallen leaves, and arranged in spiral rows.
The Sigillaria, or “seal tree,” was similar to the Lepidodendron, but its fluted trunk divided into even fewer branches, and was dotted with vertical rows of leaf scars, like the impressions of a seal.