New display at the Creation Evidence Museum
Just completed, this is a cast of a polystrate fossil lycopod (specifically, Lepidophloios) from a coal mine in Tennessee.  While the tree was molded and cast, the cliff has been reconstructed as the cliff was too unstable and I had no interest in winning the Darwin award.

The trunk is significant to the young earth argument, as the trunk clearly did not stick around for even thousands, let alone millions or tens of millions of years of supposed time.  Yet the conventional interpretation is that these trunks stood in place while the sediments around them accumulated over long periods of time.  They are assumed to have been buried "in-situ," or in place.

I personally examined the area specifically looking for the roots of these polystrate plants.  Though I found over a dozen lycopods and over a dozen calamites, I did not find a single root anywhere - not in-situ, nor in the tailings from the mine.  It is possible that all of the roots were taken up in the coal, but at other "fossil forests" (such as Joggins, Nova Scotia), roots are always found, even though they are often stripped from the stumps.

In some instances of vertically buried stumps, there may be intact roots, but the stump has been buried upside-down!  Clearly intact roots are not an indicator of "in-situ" burial.

To bury such a large plant vertically requires a large flood.  I would suggest it was the flood of Noah, seeing as how many of these layers containing polystrates are provincial in size and sometimes stacked thousands of feet thick.

You can see a previous report on the Joggins fossil cliffs at:
http://www.ianjuby.org/jogginsa.html
The find:
First photographed in 1975 by National Geographic, the article claimed this trunk was in a coal mine near Cookesville, TN and cut through some 30 feet of strata.  The actual location was kept secret, but
In January of 2008, Shauna Carey, a friend of the museum, decided she would try to track down the polystrate fossil.  After a series of phone calls, she was handed over to Neil Owens of the American Lands and Forest Management.  Neil spoke with the previous land owner who was fortunately still alive and was present during the National Geographic visit.  Upon getting exact location, Neil figured out how to get there using all of the new roads that have only been built within the past year or so for the oil and gas wells in the mountains.

A team from the Creation Evidence Museum was assembled; David Lines (taking the photo, and thus not in the picture), led by (left to right) Neil Owens, with Shauna and Matt Carrie, Dr. Don Patton and Dr. Carl Baugh.  A preliminary survey of the mine and the polystrates was undertaken in the winter cold.  It took a short while to figure out which tree was the one featured in National Geographic because the photographer had gotten down on the ground and taken the photo with a wide-angle lens, looking almost straight up.
The main fossil:

There are several things to be learned from the fossil itself, features which have been meticulously recreated in the model which is now on display at the Creation Evidence Museum.


Further evidence of flood deposition can be seen as depicted in the model.  The VISS is a Vegetation Induced Sedimentary Structure.  It is quite common with polystrate fossils.  It is the result of a powerful flow (In this case from right to left) which, as it splits to go around the trunk, it accelerates and scours the sediments on the upstream side.  As the water joins back together on the downstream side, it slows down and thus deposits sediments on the downstream side.  Thus the sedimentary layers appear "bent" uphill to the downstream side.  Also, crossbedding was quite prominent in several layers, which again (as our own research at CEM showed) is produced by flowing water depositing sediments.  See our research report: http://www.ianjuby.org/sedimentation/

The bottom portion of the trunk is offset to the back because of tectonic shifting.  The shale has slid backward relative to the rest of the layers, and thus sheared the trunk.  This portion also has a little of the coal still clinging to it.  Remembering that what we are looking at is the mud that filled the inside of the giant, hollow reed.  This mud has now hardened into rock.  The plant itself turned to coal, and most of that has eroded out of the cliff.  Some of that coalified plant is still in place on the bottom portion of the trunk.

If you get the chance, visit the Creation Evidence Museum and see the display.