The fossilized web of a 385-million-year-old root network has scientists reimagining what the world's first forests might once have looked like.
The picture they have painted couldn't be more different to what now sits in its place. Near the small town of Cairo in upstate New York, under an old highway department quarry, scientists have reconstructed the remains of what was a mighty and mature old-growth forest – home to at least three of the world's earliest tree-like plants.
Some of these initial tree 'wannabes' (known as cladoxylopsids) would have looked like large stalks of celery, shooting 10 meters (32 feet) into the sky. Others resembled pine trees, but with hairy, fern-like fronds for leaves (Archaeopteris). The third long-lost plant would have taken after the palm tree, with a bulbous base and canopy of fern-like branches (Eospermatopteris).
Seven parallel cross-sections of the Cairo site have researchers thinking these primordial trees were quite old and large. As such, they were not packed densely together, but were relatively scattered across a floodplain that ebbed and flowed with the seasons.
Dry periods were a regular part of the cycle, and yet the Cairo forest, which traced the Catskill river, seemed to host primitive trees we once thought could only survive in swamps or river deltas. These tree-like plants belong to the genus Eospermatopteris, and they look sort of like tall ferns standing on bulbous stumps.
Because these towering plants have shallow roots that don't branch, they probably didn't cope well in drier conditions - so their presence in the ancient floodplains of Cairo is confusing. READ MORE
