Devonian fossil wood from the New Albany shale in Kentucky

I was going through some of my boxes of Devonian material the other day and came across some specimens of coalified wood that I'd found a few years back in Kentucky. The fossils were found at a location where some rock had been dumped as fill. I'd been alerted to the location by a member of the Fossil Forum who'd found a piece of fish bone at the same location. I didn't find any bone but these carbonized impressions were pretty cool so I picked up what I could find. I'd forgotten about them until I pulled this flat out of a box.

I have no idea what species of plant they came from but they sort of look like the Calamites stems I find in Pennsylvanian aged rocks. These fossils come from rock that I think belongs to the New Albany Shale which is upper Devonian in age. I do have a piece of petrified wood from the New Albany Shale that I blogged about here, but it does not look quite the same as what I collected.

Here is a panoramic view of the collecting locality as it existed in  2009.

Callixylon newberryi

The Devonian is the time period during which the first "trees" evolved. This is evidenced by fossilized wood that is found within sediments that were laid down in the ocean. The piece below is a portion of Callixylon newberryi and was given to me by my friend Herb who found it in Kentucky within the New Albany Shale.

You can see wood grain structure when viewed closely. Mike over at Louisville Fossils has some magnified pictures of one piece.

The New Albany Shale is a series of thin bedded black shales that were deposited in the Upper Devonian to Lower Mississippian. It corresponds to the Antrim Shale of the Michigan Basin, the Ohio Shale of eastern Ohio and eastern Kentucky, the Chattanooga Shale of Tennessee and central Kentucky and the Kettle Point formation in Ontario (technically part of the Antrim shale).