DECEMBER 21, 2019
Scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest forest after discovering the remnants of trees in fossils dating back 386 million years.
The fossils were found in a sandstone quarry in Cairo, New York.
The researchers say they provide evidence of an extensive network of trees, which would have spread from New York all the way into Pennsylvania and beyond.
They have calculated the forest was around 2 or 3 million years older than what had previously been thought to be the world’s oldest forest at Gilboa, also in New York State.
“This would have looked like a fairly open forest with small to moderate sized coniferous-looking trees with individual and clumped tree-fern like plants of possibly smaller size growing between them,” according to Chris Berry, of Cardiff University.
He believes the forest was eventually wiped out by a flood as many fish fossils were also found at the surface of the quarry.
The discovery suggests that the transition toward forests as we know them today began earlier than typically believed.
Two kinds of tree
Undated handout photo issued by Cardiff University of an overview of well-preserved Archaeopteris root system, (left), possible Stigmarian Isoetalean lycopsid (right). Scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest forest dating back 386 million years in an abandoned New York quarry, according to a new study. – William Stein/Christopher Berry/Press Association Images
The researchers say that the forest was home to at least two types of trees.
The first, known as cladoxylopsids, were primitive tree-fern-like plants, which lacked flat green leaves, and which also grew in vast numbers at Gilboa.
The other, known as archaeopteris, had a conifer-like woody trunk and green flattened leaves.
Undated handout photo issued by Cardiff University of eospermatopteris root system in overwash sediment. Scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest forest dating back 386 million years in an abandoned New York quarry, according to a new study. – William Stein/Press Association Images
A single example of a third type of tree was also uncovered, which remained unidentified. This could possibly have been a lycopod – a creeping, mosslike, evergreen plant, the researchers said.
All these trees reproduced using only spores rather than seeds.
Oldest forest in the world
The research team say that the Cairo forest is older than the one at Gilboa because the fossils were lower down in the sequence of rocks that occur in the Catskill mountains.
Undated handout photo issued by Cardiff University of an overview of Archaeopteris in greenish overwash sediment. Scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest forest dating back 386 million years in an abandoned New York quarry, according to a new study. – William Stein/Christopher Berry/Press Association Images
“In order to really understand how trees began to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, we need to understand the ecology and habitats of the very earliest forests, and their rooting systems,” said Dr. Berry.
“These remarkable findings have allowed us to move away from the generalities of the importance of large plants growing in forests, to the specifics of which plants, in which habitats, in which types of ecology were driving the processes of global change,” he said.
The study is published in the journal Current Biology and was led by researchers at Binghampton University in New York state.
Courtesy/Source: iNews
