New record for world’s oldest fossilized forest found in Britain by research team. Image source: PxHere
A fossilised forest, dating back 390 million years, has been discovered on high sandstone cliffs along England’s coast.
The fossilised trees date back to the Devonian period — 419 million to 358 million years ago — and are four million years older than the previous record holder, a forest in what is now New York.
The Devonian is often dubbed the ‘Age of Fishes’ due to the substantial diversity of life in the oceans, such as trilobites, ammonites, primitive sharks, and other jawed fish.
Researchers discovered the fossils on the southern side of the Bristol Channel, near a holiday camp.
The sandstone cliffs being studied are some of the highest sea cliffs along England’s coast, with some areas only accessible by boat.
The forest predates dinosaurs by over 140 million years and would have been inhabited by early arthropods and other invertebrates.
Neil Davies, lecturer with the University of Cambridge’s Earth Sciences department, estimated the early invertebrates to be 5 to 10 centimeters wide at the largest, describing them as “sizeable”.
The forest would have been populated by trees known as Calamophyton, which resembled palm trees. The trees could grow between two to four metres tall, with thin and hollow trunks with branchless leaves.
Christopher Berry, co-author to the study from Cardiff’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, worked in the area for many years prior, and could identify the trees quickly.
“It was amazing to see them so near to home. But the most revealing insight comes from seeing, for the first time, these trees in the positions where they grew,” said Dr Berry.
“It is our first opportunity to look directly at the ecology of this earliest type of forest, to interpret the environment in which Calamophyton trees were growing, and to evaluate their impact on the sedimentary system.”
“This was a pretty weird forest — not like any forest you would see today,” said Davies.
“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 evidence contained in these fossils preserves a key stage in Earth’s development, when rivers started to operate in a fundamentally different way than they had before, becoming the great erosive force they are today.”
Preserved in the sandstone, the research team discovered fossilised tree logs, plants and plant debris, traces of roots and sedimentary structures.
“People sometimes think that British rocks have been looked at enough” said Davies, “but this shows that revisiting them can yield important new discoveries.”
