Stigmaria is one of the iconic plant fossils of the Carboniferous and fragments of the narrower parts of the rhizomorph are found in most museum collections. However, very few almost entire specimens have been found and preserved. A new specimen of Stigmaria from Brymbo, North Wales is described and compared with other preserved examples from Europe and North America. The Brymbo specimen shows a large portion of trunk still attached to the large stigmarian base, which is a rare find, and this specimen supports our ideas of how these impressively large casts were formed. Stigmarias were preserved by the deposition of minerals around them following a sediment inundation, which gave sufficient support while the tissues rotted and filled with sediments. Remnants of the outer tissues were compressed to form a thin surrounding coal layer.

Assessments of conservation status are usually carried out on a global scale but national priorities often necessitate a more focused approach. Using a typology of rarity first articulated in the early 1980s by Deborah Rabinowitz, coupled with presence/absence from protected areas, preliminary conservation status at the national level was assessed for 397 species of ferns and fern allies from El Salvador in Central America. Of these, 43 lacked sufficient data, 175 were considered not of conservation concern, 106 were considered to be at risk and 73 to be threatened. The majority of the threatened species were from cloud or montane forest habitats but aquatics and species restricted to pine–oak forests are also rare and occur outside protected areas. The utility of this simple methodology is discussed and the importance of field studies by local experts with local knowledge emphasized.

A summary is given of the lycophyte species as distributed in fifteen Euramerican coalfields during Asturian (Westphalian D) times. The datasets from the coalfields are analysed using unweighted pair group cluster analyses of Jaccard's Coefficients. Separate analyses were done on the full dataset (the full list of morphospecies) and on a more restricted dataset (only the morphospecies of vegetative organs). Three groupings of coalfields were resolved in the analyses. The two most clearly defined groupings represented the intramontane basin coalfields, and the coalfields of the lowland basins on the Variscan foreland where the lycophyte floras are well documented. The third grouping included those basins with less well-studied lycophyte floras, where the apparently low species diversity has undoubtedly affected the results. More work is needed on these poorly documented floras to produce a more rigorous phytogeographical analysis.