How Can I Find The Plants Remains In Coal?

[Monchi3000]

As the photos, how can I find the plants remains for know what kind of plants and the age? Who can give me the best answer? thanks so much.

[Monchi3000]

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[Monchi3000]

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[Monchi3000]

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[painshill]

I think you will struggle to extract recognisable fossils from true coal. If it has gone as far as anthracite, which is the grade of coal most usually mined for domestic and commercial fuel then that will have undergone a degree of metamorphosis and is usually bituminous, which further decreases the possibility of intact fossils.

If you mean low-grade coal in the territory of lignite (which doesn’t look like what you have there) then you might be able to directly identify macro-fossil and meso-fossil leaf, cone, and other fragments if it’s not too compressed. Otherwise, it’s usual to treat the crushed or macerated material with strong hydrofluoric acid to dissolve the lignins and such (which takes a week or two), neutralize the slurry and then look for humified leaf fragments. These then need to bleached and it is generally possible to identify the parent plants from microscopic examination of the leaf cuticles. None of these techniques are really within the reach of amateur palaeontologists.

If we’re talking “coal balls”, which are essentially closer to peat than to coal then those will certainly contain identifiable permineralised plant fragments (but that definitely isn’t what you have there). Apart from the possible presence of obvious macro- and meso-fossils, there’s information on how to prepare this kind of material for examination of smaller debris using the cellulose acetate “peel” technique here:

http://www.palass-pubs.org/palaeontology/pdf/Vol29/Pages%20787-808.pdf

These techniques will not work on the kind of material you have pictured and – in any case – also require considerable expertise in the microscopic identification of plants (and ideally, access to a scanning electron microscope).