Friendsville Mine - Cohn Coal Unit 2 (Carboniferous of the United States)

Where: Wabash County, Illinois (38.4° N, 87.9° W: paleocoordinates 6.3° S, 23.4° W)

• coordinate stated in text

When: Cohn Coal Member (Mattoon Formation), Kasimovian (307.0 - 303.7 Ma)

• Cohn Coal interval is of mid- to upper Kasimovian age (ca. 304 Ma) and may be broadly time-equivalent to the mid-Stephanian (Barruelian) of western Europe.

Environment/lithology: marine; shale

• variety of tidal flat, estuarine, and coastal marine deposits
• complex body of laterally variable facies about 9 m thick. This succession is dominated over much of the length of the highwall by medium- to dark-gray, heterolithic, rhythmically laminated shale, which coarsens upward. Features include flaser lamination, symmetrical ripples, siderite nodules, and a rich ichnofauna of Cochlichnus, Arenicolites, and Lockeia. Along strike, especially within scoured surfaces, however, sediments may grade up into very fine to fine-grained, thinly bedded, sandstone showing cross ripple lamination, soft-sediment deformation, Lockeia, and locally, lateral accretion bedforms, 1–2 m thick. Elsewhere, the Friendsville coal may be overlain by dark-gray fossilrich calcareous shale with channels filled with productid- or crinoid dominated packstone and grainstone lenses.

•In the Friendsville Mine, a 19.5-m-thick succession is accessible in multiple benches and comprises part of the lower Mattoon Formation.

Size class: macrofossils

• Cochlichnus, Arenicolites, and Lockeia

Preservation: trace

Collected in 2009

Primary reference: D. Carpenter, H.J. Falcon-Lang, M.J. Benton and W.J. Nelson. 2011. Fishes and tetrapods in the upper Pennsylvanian (Kasimovian) Cohn Coal Member of the Mattoon formation of Illinois, United States: systematics, paleoecology, and paleoenvironments. Palaios 26:639-657 [B. Seuss/B. Seuss]more details

Purpose of describing collection: general faunal/floral analysis

PaleoDB collection 224235: authorized by Barbara Seuss, entered by Barbara Seuss on 02.02.2022

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)

Taxonomic list

Show authors, comments, and common names
 Ichnofossils -
Arenicolites sp., Cochlichnus sp., Lockeia sp.
Arenicolites sp. Salter 1857
Cochlichnus sp. Hitchcock 1858
Lockeia sp. James 1879