[IWONDR]

"The billions and billions of tons of plant-biomass material being accumulated and compressed in bogs and swamps became metamorphosed into peat, then lignite, bituminous, and finally anthracite coal. This makes sense as I have personally collected fern and plant fossils associated with coal mines in Illinois."

If coal is converted plant biomass, then why weren't the ferns and other plant fossils that you found in the coal, coal rather than fossils?

[Richard Axtell]

"If coal is converted plant biomass, then why weren't the ferns and other plant fossils that you found in the coal, coal rather than fossils?"

They were. Some of the fossil ferns were encased in ironstone concretions, others were in coal itself. Flecks of coal and carbon impressions of plant stems, ferns, etc. were locked into those concretions also. What I was looking through were the tailings mounds- hills of dirt, rock and gravel left over from open pit coal mines. The coal was found in layers and veins, which was extracted and separated out from the other materials. The layers of coal were alternated with layers of mudstone and limestone gravel, which were all mixed up in the mounds of tailings in which I found fossils.