Earth's earliest forest discovered in SW England

[pinball1970]

TL;DR Summary

In this paper we report evidence for a previously unrecognized cladoxylopsid forest landscape, archived within the Eifelian Hangman Sandstone Formation of Somerset and Devon, SW England. This unit has previously been considered palaeobotanically depauperate but is here shown to contain the earliest fossil evidence for such trees in the British record, as well as the oldest known evidence globally for the relative position of standing trees:

Paper here. https://www.lyellcollection.org/doi/abs/10.1144/jgs2023-204

Article here https://phys.org/news/2024-03-earth-earliest-forest-revealed-somerset.html

"The record of fossil forests, where tree bases are preserved where they were living, so far dates back to those discovered in New York State, at Cairo and Gilboa at about 385 million years.

"Although the area of rock exposure is limited and dangerous to access, our new discovery is the oldest clear example of such a geological phenomenon known to date and it speaks directly to the ecology of the oldest forests 390 million years ago."

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

A forest of 10ft trees sounds like a big orchard!

 

[tech99]

Not as old, but I saw some fossilised trees, and alongside were lying actual trees of the same sort. This was in Tiera del Fuego, where it is so cold the trees do not decay but lie where they fall, one upon the other in great piles.

 

[pinball1970]

As an aside, I have just noticed that the paper I linked is part of the Lyell collection. That would Charles Lyell, one of the pioneers of Geology and friend of Charles Darwin ( they had a few fall outs along the way.)

 

[Baluncore]

Further to that aside, we have "The West Coast Range" in Tasmania. The mountains in the range, were named alternately, after those for, and those against, Darwin's theory of evolution. Their names are now in opposition, forever, on the map of Tasmania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Range#Mountains
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Range#History_and_exploration