Shipment A-82-20 consists of nine cartons of fossil plants from four localities: A2 AKy-54, 78, 9, and 58. While most of the slabs show evidence of an abundance of good-sized plants having grown near the site of deposition, the coarse, gritty nature of the matrix is not conducive to good preservation. Thus, the collections contain no leaves, fruiting bodies or any other plant parts that would assist in making precise age determinations. The fossils are nearly all lycopod stems or rootstocks in various stages of decortication. A few, however, have evenly spaced parallel ribbing that suggest calamarian affinity, but there are no nodal features preserved to substantiate that impression.

Regarding the age of these collections, my overall impression is that they are all post-Devonian, and likely all Mississippian. Chances are that if confronted only by collection #58, some paleobotanists might immediately call it Pennsylvanian, but I feel that anything more precise than “Carboniferous” would be very risky. My hunch is that these are all Mississippian, but we need to see leaves in order to make a more confident age determination.

The collections are being retained for the P&S reference set.