Tag: trees
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A New Tree of Flowering Plants? For Spring? Groundbreaking.
The New York Times’ Trilobites column has a story about work to understand how plants fit into the tree of life. New research detailed in the journal Nature suggests that more than 80% of major plant lineages evolved in a sudden burst during the Jurassic Period some 150 million years ago. This new study used…
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Rare 3D fossils show that some early trees had forms unlike any you’ve ever seen before
Phys.org has a story about the discovery of an amazingly preserved “tree” from New Brunswick, Canada. The fossils, which date to about 350 million years ago during the Mississippian Period, consist of multiple specimens with one preserving how the “leaves” were distributed in the crown of the tree. Usually, just the trunk of trees are…
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Wyoming Couple Finds Forest of Gigantic 60 Million-Year-Old Petrified Trees
Examples of metasequoia trees similar to the petrified specimen found by a Wyoming couple recently on their property. (Photo by Erik Herman, Harvard.edu) Cowboy State Daily has a story about the discovery of some gigantic petrified trees near Buffalo, Wyoming. The fossil tree trunks were found while building an RV park. The fossils date to…
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Mystery of ‘living fossil’ tree frozen in time for 66 million years finally solved
Live Science has a story about the Wollemi pine. Thought extinct, the Wollemi pine was “rediscovered” in 1994 by some hikers near Sydney, Australia. Wollemia nobilis is pretty much unchanged since the Cretaceous Peiod. A group of scientists from Australia, the US, and Italy have recently published the plant’s genome. The genome gives insight into…
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The world’s oldest fossilized forest is in Greene County. It needs saving
The Times Union in Albany, New York has a story about the world’s oldest fossilized forest. The forest was discovered in a quarry in Cairo, NY, near where other ancient trees were discovered in Gilboa, NY. These lycopsid “tree” fossils date to the Devonian Period, about 400 million years ago. They were described in a…
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PBS Eons: When Trees Took Over the World
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the first “trees”… hint, they didn’t look like trees back then. 420 million years ago, the forest floor of what’s now New York was covered with a plant that didn’t look like a tree at all, except its roots were made of wood. Instead…
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In Defense of Plants: The Rise and Fall of the Scale Trees
I recently ran into an interesting post on the blog “In Defense of Plants”. It’s called “The Rise and Fall of the Scale Trees”. If you collect or are familiar with Mazon Creek fossils, you probably have heard of Lepidodendron, Stigmaria, Psaronius, Cyperites. etc. You might even have a few of these fossils. Some of…
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SciNews: Devonian Fossil Forest Unearthed in China
SciNews has a post about a Devonian aged fossil forest discovered in China. The fossilized forest dates to 360 million years ago and was found near Xinhang in China’s Anhui province. It is the oldest known fossil forest in Asia. A paper describing the fossils appeared in the journal Current Biology. The Xinhang forest covered…
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Smithsonian: Ancient Trees “Ripped Their Skeletons Apart” To Grow
The Smithsonian.com has an article about how the ancient “trees” grew. Researchers from Cardiff University, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, and State University of New York have published a paper in PNAS which studied 374 million year old fossils of a group of “trees” known as cladoxylopsids. The team’s findings, published in Proceedings of…
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Giant Sequoia ‘Tunnel Tree’ in California Is Toppled by Storm
The New York Times has a story about an ancient giant sequoia tree that fell in a heavy storm on Sunday. The tree, estimated to be more than 1,000 years old, was referred to as the “Pioneer Cabin Tree”. The base of the tree was carved out in the 1880s, which led to it becoming…
