Plus ancienne forêt pétrifiée

Scientists have discovered the world's oldest petrified forest.

The oldest petrified forest ever discovered on Earth, 390 million years old, was located in high sandstone cliffs on the Devon and Somerset coast in southwest England. This fossil forest is approximately four million years older than the previous record holder, found in New York state. The fossilized trees, known as Calamophyton primaevum, at first glance resemble palm trees, but they were the "prototype" of the trees we are familiar with today. Their trunks were thin and hollow in the center, rather than hard wood. They also lacked leaves and their branches were covered with hundreds of twigs. These trees were also significantly shorter than their descendants: the largest were between two and four meters tall. The forest dates from the Devonian period, between 419 and 358 million years ago, when life began its first great expansion onto land: at the end of the period, the first seed plants appeared and the first land animals, mainly arthropods, were well established. It is also interesting that, unlike the future ancestors of trees of the modern type, their root system was very primitive, therefore, with any even insignificant increase in the water level, it meant for them that they would lean on their side, which would lead to bending of the trunk, which would increase the chance of falling "tree". The fossils were found off Minehead, on the south bank of the Bristol Channel, near what is now Butlin's holiday camp. Previously, scientists had suggested that this stretch of England's coastline did not contain significant plant fossils, but this particular fossil find, in addition to its age, also shows how early trees helped shape landscapes and stabilize riverbanks and coastlines hundreds of millions of years ago. The results are reported in the Journal of the Geological Society.