The 390-million-year-old forest landscape, archived within the Eifelian Hangman Sandstone Formation of Somerset and Devon in England, is roughly 4 million years older than the previous record holder, which was found in New York State, the United States.
The Devonian period (419-359 million years ago) was arguably the most crucial chapter in the evolution of Earth’s land biosphere.
Non-marine environments at the end of the preceding Silurian period accommodated nascent invertebrate communities in near-water settings, witnessed frequent invasions of freshwater bodies by jawless fish, and hosted scattered stands of small, simple plants in coastal regions, but their equivalents 60 million years later were unrecognizable.
By the end of the Devonian period, the range of permanent invertebrate habitats had expanded to even the driest non-marine settings jawless and jawed fish had become enduringly resident in lakes and rivers, evolutionary developments amongst vertebrates meant that tetrapods traversed river margins and floodplains, and there had been an explosion in disparity amongst plants that saw vast inland forests of multi-meter tall trees in addition to a huge diversity of other plant groups, including woody shrubs.
This fundamental transformation not only triggered novel interactions between different organisms, such as the rise of herbivory and detritivory, but also saw many new organism-environment interactions take shape.
“The Devonian period fundamentally changed life on Earth,” said Professor Neil Davies, a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge.
“It also changed how water and land interacted with each other, since trees and other plants helped stabilize sediment through their root systems, but little is known about the very earliest forests.”
The fossils discovered by Professor Davies and colleagues are the oldest fossilized trees ever found in Britain, and the oldest known fossil forest on Earth.
The fossilized trees, known as
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