Note 15 — Chapter IX · The Journey Southward

Professor Nathorst writes to me as follows: “In spite of their very fragmentary condition the vegetable fossils brought home by you are of great interest, as they give us our first insight into the plant-world in regions north of the eightieth degree of latitude during the latter part of the Jurassic period. The most common are leaves of a fir-tree (Pinus) which resembles the Pinus Nordenskiöldi (Heer) found in the Jurassic strata of Spitzbergen, East Siberia, and Japan, but which probably belongs to a different species. There occur also narrower leaves of another species, and furthermore male flowers and fragments of a pine cone15 with several seeds (Figs. 1–3), one of which (Fig. 1) suggests the Pinus Maakiana (Heer) from the Jurassic strata of Siberia. Among traces of other pine-trees may be mentioned those of a broad-leaved Taxites, resembling Taxites gramineus (Heer), specially found in the Jurassic strata of Spitzbergen and Siberia, which has leaves of about the same size as those of the Cephalotaxus Fortunei, at present existing in China and Japan. It is interesting, too, to find remains of the genus Feildenia (Figs. 4 and 5), which has as yet been found only in the polar regions. It was first discovered by Nordenskiöld in the Tertiary strata near Cape Staratschin, on Spitzbergen, in 1868, and was described by Heer under the name of Torellia. It was subsequently found by Feilden in the Tertiary strata at Discovery Bay, in Grinnell Land, during the English Polar Expedition of 1875–76; and Heer now changed the generic name to Feildenia, as Torellia had already been employed as the name of a mussel. This species has since been found by me in 1882 in the Upper Jurassic strata of Spitzbergen. The leaves remind one of the leaves of the subspecies nageia of the existing genus Podocarpus.