I admit to some confusion myself now considering this whole coal question.
To add more confusion to this it seems that the compression ratio may be
difficult to determine as using "modern" trees as an example because they
might not represent the pre-flood flora.
I was under the impression that most coal was made up of the remains of
lycopyte and sphenite material. This would be mosly extinct tree-form
lycopods and hortails. Maybe my impressions are wrong. What is the
consensus on how much dicot (flowering plant) wood there is in the coal
record. My guess would be only the most recent coals (mostly soft brown
coals if I remember my coal terminology) would contain any dicot wood. The
point here is that in general lycopods and sphenites likely had very porous
wood (much like todays tree ferns and palms) and thus the compression
factor was very high, as opposed to dicot (flowering plant) wood which has
a high density/specific gravity.
On a similar note, the vast amount of fern-like fossilized material would
seems to imply that the world was covered prodominantly with fern-like
plants. Am I way off here in my impression of the fossil record?
Joel
>
>
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department Plant Biology
Southern Illinois University
http://www.intrnet.net/~virkotto/treering.htm or pictures.htm
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Joel and Dawn Duff ,-~~-.___.
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e-mail: duff@siu.edu \_/-, ,----'
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