| Ever See a
Nodule ? by Sydne H. Langford |
| Millions of years before Man
appeared upon the earth, our whole world was under water. In
many places, where the water was not very deep, plants and animals
began to emerge from the sea. Trees began to grow, with plumes of
fern-like foliage. They grew and fell down, year after year
through many ages, building up a layer of swampy vegetation.
Insects began to fly about, and crawling things came out into the
sunshine. At rare intervals, the earth shifted this way and that, bringing repeated infiltration of the sea which left soft silt and sand atop the swamp litter. The whole world seemed to wait, while the immersed content of the leaves hardened the silt just around them, eventually forming stone cases which closely followed their shapes. These stone cases are called nodules. From childhood, George Langford was fascinated by the treasure to be found in rocks. He searched in quarries, along ocean beaches, and wherever he found outcroppings of rock. George first collected Mazon Creek nodules in the very early 1900's and was interested in the perfect preservation of the fern-like leaves. He found that a French scientist named Lesquereux had collected nodules from the same Mazon Creek in the 1830's, and had published descriptions and drawings of them. He was already familiar with similar and also identical plant specimens that had been found in the coal mines in Europe. Through his association with the head of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Chicago, George met the head of the department of fossil plants, who identified many species, and coached George in the use of the already published books on the so-called coal plants. George first formed a collection at home, outgrew the available space, and began forming several collections of fine specimens, already cleaned and treated with his "developing" process to bring out their beautiful details. The largest of these collections went to the Field Museum, and George secured Museum permission to continue his work of "developing" and identifying them. He was provided with an office and work room on the third floor and did their volunteer work for about two years. The Museum rewarded George by appointing him "Curator of Fossil Plants," and he still continues as a Museum appointee in that capacity. During his six years there [the year is now about 1956 - GLIII] the Field Museum collection of fossil plants has grown until it is considered to be the largest and finest in the world, and contains the greatest variety ever found in any one small locality. The collection now contains over thirty thousand specimens of seven hundred species of plants and animals. George has also written a book, illustrated with excellent photographs and many of his own black-ink line drawings. [That would be The Wilmington Coal Flora from a Pennsylvanian Deposit in Will County, Illinois, published by ESCONI Associates, Downers Grove, Illinois, 1958 - GLIII.] I went with George on his first collecting trip to Mazon Creek. We took a street-car from our home on Union Street in Joliet to the down-town way station; then a train trip to Morris, Illinois; then by a hired horse and buggy to a spot on the bank of Mazon Creek. A friendly farmer showed us where we could put the horse under a tree. After an amused inspection of my pale-blue, lace-encrusted costume, he guided us through his hot cornfield to the edge of the creek, high above the water. No path led downward, so we slipped down into the water. The water was a little extra deep, and there was no place to walk except up the middle of the creek. I was eventually extricated, immaculate above the knees, soaking wet below them, beside a bush where I could watch George. George waded the creek, trousers rolled up high, his collecting bag over his shoulder, a small pick in his hand, picking up nodules from the creek bed. Suddenly, a voice behind me said, in wondering tone, "I never seen any fun in it. They come and they come, but I never hear any fun in it." It was the friendly farmer again. He laughed at my bedraggled skirts and shoes, and tossed me a large, cold watermelon. "I thought it might cool you," he said. George joined me and we feasted. Nothing ever tasted quite so good. George gathered many nodules; many had split open and had already been washed clean by the stream. While they were wet, they showed their detail well and also their colors, mostly a reddish brown. Many years after this first episode, George learned that strip mining activities near Wilmington, Braidwood, and Coal City were creating great piles of clay filled with fossil-bearing nodules. He and my son, George, Jr. rushed down to see what it all looked like. He found enormous earth-moving machines stripping the clay overburden from the layers of coal to expose it. George was tolerably welcome to explore anywhere he wanted to, but the freshly stripped areas were quite free of nodules. The spoil heaps were another story. Here, the nodules had often been washed out of the clay by the rain and were visible everywhere. They were easy to see but hard to collect. Collecting required clambering up and down steep, slippery clay ridges, then digging them out of the clay, then cracking them open with a hammer, and then transporting them by the pail-full to a car waiting a considerable distance away, then coating them with a solution George had invented that brought out their details and coloring. George called this process "developing" them. Coached by Dr. Noe of the University of Chicago, George found that he was collecting species never seen by Lesquereux, and not shown in any published coal plant books. He commenced the practice of giving every new species new names. George also began to find two already named specimens of different species attached to each other in a single nodule, a problem hard to solve without undoing the classification work that had already been done by coal plant scientists. Though George's plant and animal fossils are known to be two hundred and fifty million years old, their forms are as complex as their counterparts today. The spiders are not as stylishly slim-waisted as the modern ones, but many are dressed in exquisite tortoise-shell and snake-skin patterns that outshine the later spiders. The old cockroaches are our most distinguished ancestors of our living ones, having enlarged nothing but their size. The [fossil spiders] are much larger than they are today, and I like to think that someday they will entirely shrink away. Why not go and see George's nodules ? He will spread them out on his work table, where you can see the tree bark designs, the delicate vein tracings on the fern leaves, and the eyelids of a tiny, one-inch fish. You can also see his book on these old fossils, which he says he has written for "children from seven to seventy." Sidney Holmes Langford
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