How can a phanerogamic taxonomist learn what fossils, if any, have been attributed to the group he is studying? To make a really thorough search, one might look into each of the hundreds of papers on fossil angiosperms listed in such bibliographic sources as Biological Abstracts, World Report on Palaeobotany, and Bibliographie des Sciences de la Terre published by the French Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minieres. Having had some experience with this approach, I do not recommend it to the working taxonomist. Happily, there is another method that can lead one into the relevant literature on megafossils almost as effectively and with far less labor: One simply looks up the genera of interest in the U. S. Geological Survey's Compendium Index of Paleobotany. The Index, a file of about 150,000 entries on paper slips, is well known to paleobotanists and to nomenclaturally inclined "neobotanists" as the basis for Andrews' (1955, 1970) Index of Generic Names. This note is meant to remind Brittonia readers of the existence of the Index and to show how its use would have improved Alan and Shirley Graham's "The geologic history of the Lythraceae" (Brittonia 23: 335346. 1971). Although the Grahams make no claim that their survey is exhaustive, their title and introductory remarks lead one to expect an up-to-date treatment of both megafossils and microfossils. Insofar as the megafossil record-consisting mostly of fruits and seeds-is concerned, this expectation is not fulfilled. Lack of attention to recent literature is most evident in the Grahams' treatment of the extinct genus Diclidocarya. Citing a 1927 report, the Grahams say: "Diclidocarya is known only from the Oligocene of Germany." Actually, Diclidocarya was found in Miocene deposits near Tomsk in West Siberia (Nikitin, 1935) only a few years after it had been reported from the Oligocene of Germany. Additional West Siberian localities have since been reported by Dorofeev (1957, 1959, 1962), by P. A. Nikitin (1948, 1965), and by V. P. Nikitin (1968). A scanning of the fossils listed for each locality in Dorofeev's (1963a) book on the Tertiary floras of West Siberia shows how abundant Diclidocarya must have been in this area during the Oligocene and Miocene epochs. Reported from Poland two decades ago (Szafer, 1952), Diclidocarya is now known from at least three widely separated Tertiary localities: Rypin (Laficuska-Srodoniowa, 1957), Konin (Raniecka-Bobrowska, 1959), and Doman'ski Wierch near Nowy Targ (Lanicuska-Srodoniowa, 1963). Diclidocarya also occurs in Lower Bartonian (Eocene) deposits of Hampshire, England (Chandler, 1960), and recent German reports include new mid-Tertiary localities in both Upper Lusatia (Mai, 1964) and Lower Lusatia (Mai, 1967). There is a Miocene locality at Polevskol in the southern Urals (Dorofeev, 1970) and another at Mamontova Gora in Yakutsk ASSR (Dorofeev, 1969). For the geographic range of fossil Decodon, the Grahams give localities in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Russia. The stratigraphic range is said to be "from the Oligocene to the Recent." Actually, the Decodon record begins in the Eocene (southern England, Chandler, 1960; Khara-Nur basin in Irkutsk oblast, Dorofeev, 1970), and the geographic range now includes several Polish localities (Lanicuska8rodoniowa, 1957, 1963; Raniecka-Bobrowska, 1957, 1959; Szafer, 1961), as well as numerous additional localities in Soviet Asia (Dorofeev, 1963a, 1969; for map, see Dorofeev, 1963b). The recent finding of Decodon remains at a Neogene site in the