Scientists have uncovered the oldest fossilized forest, dating back 390 million years to a time when life was just getting a foothold on land. The ancient forest was made up of the first trees to ever grow on Earth – bizarre “prototype” trees that had to rip their skeletons apart in order to grow.
Among the sandstone cliffs of South West England, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Cardiff discovered a startlingly well-preserved scene: an entire fossilized forest, complete with stumps, logs, fallen branches, and root systems.
It dates back to the Devonian Period, when plants made their first foray onto dry land and animals soon followed. As such, it would have looked like an alien world to our modern eyes.
“This was a pretty weird forest – not like any forest you would see today,” said Professor Neil Davies, first author of the study. “There wasn’t any undergrowth to speak of and grass hadn’t yet appeared, but there were lots of twigs dropped by these densely-packed trees, which had a big effect on the landscape.”
The trees themselves, known as Calamophyton, were a bizarre rough draft of the diverse group of plants we know and love now. They look vaguely Dr. Seussian, with their knobbly trunks and topped with pom-pom tufts that drop branches constantly. Their trunks were hollow, made up of a ring of strands like “mini trees” that slurped up water from the ground.
But the weirdest thing is the self-destructive way they grew. The strands expanded like modern trees, each adding rings to their outer surface, until they stretched themselves too far apart and the connective tissue between them tore. As such, they didn’t seem to grow taller than about 4 m (13 ft).
“There is no other tree that I know of in the history of the Earth that has ever done anything as complicated as this,” Dr. Chris Berry, co-author of the study, previously said. “The tree simultaneously ripped its skeleton apart and collapsed under its own weight while staying alive and growing upwards and outwards to become the dominant plant of its day.”
It seems that evolution eventually figured out the age-old rule of “Keep It Simple, Stupid,” and tuned later trees so they mostly had just one solid trunk that was strong enough to support its own weight. Still, it’s always fascinating to see early prototypes of things we take for granted nowadays.
The Calamophyton was not just the first land-growing plant that we’d call a tree, it was also the first that could grow in forests, as the new discovery indicates. It pips the previous record-holder, a network of root systems discovered in New York, by about five million years. Together, these remnants hark back to a pivotal time in Earth’s history.
“The Devonian period fundamentally changed life on Earth,” said Davies. “It also changed how water and land interacted with each other, since trees and other plants helped stabilise sediment through their root systems, but little is known about the very earliest forests.”
The research was published in the Journal of the Geological Society.
Source: University of Cambridge
