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"Long
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March 03, 2012
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“Oldest” fossilized forest revealed
March 3, 2012
Courtesy of Cardiff University
and World
Science staff
A fossil forest in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New
York is not only the oldest forest known—it’s also much more complex than once thought, researchers are reporting. Chris Berry of Cardiff
University studies the stump of a Gilboa tree. (Courtesy of Cardiff
U.)
The Gilboa fossil forest is believed to date back 385 million years. Nor is it new to science: fossils of hundreds of large stumps of a type of tree dubbed the
“Gilboa tree” first turned up in the 1920s during excavation of a quarry to extract rock to build the nearby
Gilboa Dam. But only limited information was recorded at the time, and the quarry was soon backfilled.
In May 2010, the quarry was partially emptied as part of a dam maintenance project. Researchers were monitoring the site with contractors and found where the original quarry floor had been exposed, and the roots and positions of the trunk bases preserved.
“We were able to arrange for about 1,300 square meters to be cleaned off for investigation. A map of the position of all the plant fossils preserved on that surface was made,” said Chris Berry, an earth scientist at
Cardiff University in Wales.
The findings by Berry and colleagues are published in the March 1 issue of the the journal
Nature. They describe bases of the “Gilboa trees” as spectacular bowl-shaped pits up to nearly two meters (yards) wide, surrounded by thousands of roots. These are believed to be the bases of trees up to about 10 meters high, that looked something like a palm tree or a tree fern.
One of the biggest surprises was that the researchers found many woody, horizontally-lying stems, up to about 15 cm (6 inches) thick. The investigators determined that these were ground-running trunks of another type of plant called an aneurophytalean progymnosperm, only previously known from upright branches. They also found one large example of a tree-shaped club moss, the type of tree that commonly forms coal seams in younger rocks across Europe and North America.
“All this demonstrates that the ‘oldest forest’ at Gilboa was a lot more ecologically complex than we had suspected, and probably contained a lot more carbon locked up as wood than we previously knew about. This will enable more refined speculation about the way in which the evolution of forests changed the Earth,” Berry said. “Personally, the chance to walk on that ancient forest floor, and to imagine the plants that I have been studying as fossils for more than 20 years standing alive in the positions marked by their bases, was a career highlight.”
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A fossil forest in the Catskill Mountains is the oldest one known, and is more complex than once thought, researchers are reporting. The Gilboa fossil forest, in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, is believed to date back 385 million years. Nor is it new to science: fossils of hundreds of large stumps of a type of tree dubbed the “Gilboa tree” first turned up in the 1920s during excavation of a quarry to extract rock to build the nearby Gilboa Dam. But only limited information was recorded at the time, and the quarry was soon backfilled. In May 2010, the quarry was partially emptied as part of a dam maintenance project. Researchers were monitoring the site with contractors and found where the original quarry floor had been exposed, and the roots and positions of the trunk bases preserved. “We were able to arrange for about 1,300 square meters to be cleaned off for investigation. A map of the position of all the plant fossils preserved on that surface was made,” said Chris Berry, an earth scientist at Cardif University in Wales. The findings by Berry and colleagues are published in the March 1 issue of the the journal Nature. They describe bases of the “Gilboa trees” as spectacular bowl-shaped pits up to nearly two meters (yards) wide, surrounded by thousands of roots. These are believed to be the bases of trees up to about 10 meters high, that looked something like a palm tree or a tree fern. One of the biggest surprises was that the researchers found many woody horizontally-lying stems, up to about 15 cm (6 inches) thick. The investigators determined that these were ground-running trunks of another type of plant called an aneurophytalean progymnosperm, only previously known from upright branches. They also found one large example of a tree-shaped club moss, the type of tree that commonly forms coal seams in younger rocks across Europe and North America. “All this demonstrates that the ‘oldest forest’ at Gilboa was a lot more ecologically complex than we had suspected, and probably contained a lot more carbon locked up as wood than we previously knew about. This will enable more refined speculation about the way in which the evolution of forests changed the Earth,” Berry said. “Personally, the chance to walk on that ancient forest floor, and to imagine the plants that I have been studying as fossils for more than 20 years standing alive in the positions marked by their bases, was a career highlight.”