@bewildered,
this is old crap and its all been debunked before . You need to keep up with the phony literature from the coal region. Mahanoy City has been the center of many a fake fossil from the "coal measures"
This "fossil" may eiother be
1 the sample that was actually a skull of a poor 19th century miner that was trapped in a tunnel mine and was altered by the acid medium
or
2It was the concretion that was part of a "lepidondraleia" tree bark and tissue that had been fossilized. Many times the fossil cycads and horsetails are found deformed by overlying coal measures that the shapes take on bizarre forms.
ITS NOT A SKULL and the guy who reported it, Ed Conrad, is a famous fake.