Scientists have discovered remains of the world's oldest fossil forest in a sandstone quarry in Cairo, near New York (United States). It is believed that the extensive network of trees, which would have extended from New York to Pennsylvania and beyond, is about 386 million years old, as published in the journal Current Biology .
This means that the Cairo forest is about two or three million years older than what was thought to be the oldest forest in the world, in Gilboa, also in the state of New York and about 40 kilometers from the Cairo site. As a comparison, the oldest dinosaur fossils that have been found are around 240 million years old.
The new findings shed new light on the evolution of trees and the transformative role they played in shaping the world we live in today.
A team led by scientists from Binghamton University, the New York State Museum and Cardiff University have mapped more than 3,000 square meters of forest in the abandoned quarry in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in the Hudson Valley.
Their investigations showed that the forest harbored at least two types of trees: cladoxilopsides, primitive plants resembling arborescent ferns, lacking flat green leaves and also growing in large quantities in Gilboa; and Archaeopteris , which had a coniferous woody trunk and leaf-like branches that had crushed green leaves.
A single example of a third type of tree was also discovered, which remained unidentified but could possibly have been a lycopene. All these trees reproduce using only spores instead of seeds.
The team also found a "spectacular" and extensive network of roots that were more than eleven meters long in some places that belonged to the Archaeopteris trees.
It is these long-lived woody roots, with multiple levels of branching and small perpendicular feeder roots of short life, that transformed the interactions of plants and soils and, therefore, were fundamental to the coevolution of forests and the atmosphere , say the researchers.
Until now, trees such as cladoxilópsidos only had roots in the form of tape and mostly unbranched that had to be constantly replaced as the plant grew on the ground.
They believe that the forest was finally devastated by a flood due to the presence of many fish fossils that were also visible on the surface of the quarry.
"It is surprising to see plants that were previously believed to have mutually exclusive habitat preferences growing together in the former Catskill Delta," said study co-author Dr. Chris Berry of the Earth and Ocean Science Faculty of the Cardiff University.
"This would have looked like a fairly open forest with coniferous-looking trees of small to moderate size with individual ferns and grouped together as plants of possibly smaller ferns growing between them," he adds.
The research team says that the forest of Cairo is older than that of Gilboa because the fossils were lower in the sequence of rocks that occur in the Catskill mountains.
Ecology of the first forests
"To really understand how trees began to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, we need to understand the ecology and habitats of the first forests and their rooting systems," explains Dr. Berry.
"These remarkable findings have allowed us to move away from the generalities of the importance of the large plants that grow in the forests, to the details of which plants, in what habitats, in what types of ecology were driving the processes of global change, " he continues. .
"We were literally able to drill the fossil soil between the trees and now we can investigate the geochemical changes in the soil with our colleagues at the University of Sheffield. We are really understanding the transition from Earth to a wooded planet ," Berry adds.
"The Devonian period represents a time when the first forest appeared on planet Earth," adds William Stein, professor emeritus of biological sciences at Binghamton University. "The effects were of the first order, in terms of changes in ecosystems, what happens on the surface of the Earth and the oceans, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the global climate."
"There were so many drastic changes at that time as a result of those original forests basically, the world has never been the same since then," he concludes.
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