An illustration of what the trees in Earth's earliest forest may have looked like. (Image credit: Peter Giesen/Chris Berry)
LiveScience has a story about the discovery of a very old fossil forest. Found in southwestern England, this ancient forest dates to around 390 million years ago, during the Devonian Period. That makes it the oldest known fossil forest, about 4 million years older than the Gilboa fossil forest in New York. A description of the find was published in the Journal of the Geological Society.
"Why it's important — broadly — is it ticks the boxes of being the oldest fossil forest," Davies, a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told Live Science. The finding is also remarkable because it reveals stark differences between the complex array of ancient plants found at Gilboa and the newly discovered forest, which appears to have hosted just one type of plant, Davies said.
This now-extinct type of plants, known as cladoxylopsids, is thought to be closely related to ferns and sphenopsids (horsetails). "They look like palm trees, but they're in no way related to palm trees," Davies said. "They've got a long central stem and what look like palm fronds coming off, but those palm fronds aren't really leaves — they're actually just lots of twiglets."
