Imagine a world where giant insects and bizarre creatures ruled the land—a world steamy, lush, and alien, teeming with life ...

Carboniferous coal was produced by bark-bearing trees that grew in vast lowland swamp forests. Vegetation included giant club mosses, tree ferns, great horsetails, and towering trees with strap ...

The shale roof—made of the sediment that destroyed the forest so long ago—is cracking and flaking off now that the coal below it ... a period known as the Carboniferous, have yielded fossils ...

It is a genuine coal field *of the carboniferous series, however, and is of the same age as the great coal deposits in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio. The only difference seems to be that the ...