This evening I dug out my copy of John McPhee's Annals of the Former World. In my library I do have to dig through strata of accumulated books to find the one I want, more so than I do out on the hunt for fossils. McPhee writes such lovely prose, and if you want to know about deep time and the geology of the North American continent, not to mention the geologists that study them, he's your man and is the book. This is his description of the late Carboniferous landscape:
"...vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. They were not huge by our standards but they were big trees, some with diamond patterns precisioned in their bark.
Collected at Lake Keystone, west of Tulsa
They had thick boles and were about a hundred feet high. Other trees had bark like the bark of hemlocks and leaves like flat straps. Others had the fluted, swollen bases of cypress.
Tree trunk segments from Seminole Formation shale at Hwy. 75 excavation
In and out among the trunks flew dragonflies with the wingspans of great horned owls. Amphibians not only were walking around easily but some of them had become reptiles. Through the high meshing crowns of the trees not a whole lot of light filtered down. The understory was all but woven-of rushlke woody plants and seed ferns.
Slab of fossil foliage, also collected at Hwy. 75 site
There were luxuriant tree ferns as much as fifty feet high. The scene suggests a tropical rain forest but was more akin to the Everglades, the Dismal Swamp, the Atchafalaya basin-a hummocky spongy landscape ending in a ragged coast."
10:51:17 PM 
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