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Who first used the name Mississippian for Carboniferous rocks?
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Carboniferous Period
Distribution of landmasses, mountainous regions, shallow seas, and deep ocean basins during the late Carboniferous Period. Included in the paleogeographic reconstruction are the locations of the interval's subduction zones.
The term Mississippian was first used to describe the "subcarboniferous" strata of North America in 1870 by the American geologist Alexander Winchell.1
Winchell applied the name to a sequence of limestones that had been previously identified in 1839 by the American geologist David Dale Owen along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.1