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Trees are believed to have appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Since then, evidence for these ancient plant protectors has been scant.
Now, the new discovery of unique 3D tree fossils has expanded our understanding of the architecture of trees throughout Earth history, providing a window into what the world was like when the planet’s first forests began to develop.
Five tree fossils that were buried alive as a result of an earthquake 350 million years ago were found in a quarry in New Brunswick, Canada, according to a study published Friday in the journal Current Biology. The authors believe that these new and unusual fossil trees are unique to Dr. Not only do they have a surprising shape reminiscent of a Seuss illustration, they also reveal clues to a period of life on Earth that we know little about, he said.
“They are time capsules,” said paleontologist and sedimentologist Robert Gastaldo, who led the study, “little windows into deep-time landscapes and ecosystems.”
Co-authors Olivia King and Matthew Stimson uncovered the first of the ancient trees while doing fieldwork at a rock quarry in New Brunswick in 2017. One of the examples they discovered is among a handful of examples in the entire plant fossil record spanning more than 400 million years where a tree’s branches and petals are still attached to its trunk.
According to Gastaldo, very few tree fossils have been found that date back to the world’s oldest forests. Their discoveries help fill in some missing pieces in an incomplete fossil record.
“There are only five or six trees that we can document that had an intact crown preserved at least in the Paleozoic,” said Gastaldo, a geology professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
He noted that most ancient tree specimens are relatively small and are often discovered in the form of a stump or a fossilized trunk with a root system attached. The paleontologist was “stunned” when his colleagues found a preserved tree that could have been 15 meters tall when mature and had a crown 18 meters in diameter.
ancient earthquake burial
Researchers excavated the first fossil tree about seven years ago, but it took several more years before four more specimens of the same plant were found in close proximity to each other. The newly identified species was named “Sanfordiacaulis” in honor of Laurie Sanford, owner of the quarry where the trees were unearthed.
The forms taken by these previously unknown 350-million-year-old plants resemble a modern-day fern or palm, according to the study, even though these tree species did not appear until 300 million years later. But while familiar ferns or palm trees have a small number of leaves at their tops, the most complete example of the newly discovered fossils has more than 250 leaves preserved around its trunk, with each partially preserved frond extending about 5.7 feet (1.7 meters).
According to Stimson, assistant curator of geology and paleontology at the New Brunswick Museum, the fossil is in a sandstone rock and is roughly the size of a small car.
The cluster of trees’ unique fossilization was likely caused by a “catastrophic” earthquake-induced landslide in an ancient rift lake, he said.
“These trees were alive when the earthquake happened. “They sank to the bottom of the lake very quickly after that, and then the lake returned to normal,” Stimson said.
Finding entire fossil trees is rare and much less common than finding a complete dinosaur, according to Peter Wilf, a paleobotanist and professor of earth sciences at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the study. The “unusual” new fossil tree is a relic from a time when almost no tree fossils existed, Wilf said via email.
“The new fossils represent a breakthrough in our understanding of how early forest structure evolved, ultimately leading to complex rainforest architectures that support much of Earth’s living biodiversity,” Wilf added.
‘Very Dr. Seuss’
According to King, the research assistant who found the fossil group at the New Brunswick Museum, Sanfordiacaulis was named after Dr. It looked like something ripped from Seuss’ most popular works.
“You know how in ‘The Lorax’ there are big pom-poms and narrow trunks at the top of the trees? These probably have a similar structure. “It’s got a huge crown at the top, and then it narrows and curves down to this very small trunk,” King said. “It’s a very Dr. Seuss-like tree. It’s a weird and wonderful idea of what this thing might look like.”
But Sanfordiacaulis’ reign was short-lived, researchers said. “We don’t see this facility architecture again,” Stimson told CNN. It thrived during the Early Carboniferous period, a period at the end of the Paleozoic Era when plants and animals began to diversify as they made their way from water to land, he noted.
Much of evolution is experimental; Success is often measured by the species’ versatility, or its ability to adapt to many different places and conditions. Stimson added that the strange array of tree fossils provides evidence of a “failed experiment in science and evolution.” “We’re really starting to paint a picture of what life was like 350 million years ago.”
Looking forward
In addition to helping people understand how life has changed in the past, fossils like Sanfordiacaulis can also help scientists understand where life on our planet might be heading next.
According to the researchers behind the discovery, the existence of this particular species indicates that trees at that time began to occupy different ecological niches beyond what had been previously understood.
Gastaldo sees this as an indication that plants — like early invertebrates — were experimenting with how to adapt to their environment. The earthquake that likely caused trees to fossilize also provides new geological evidence of what might be happening in Earth’s systems at the same time.
“This is really the first evidence we have of a tree somewhere between the one that grows on the ground and the one that rises very high above the ground,” Gastaldo said. “What else was there?”
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