World's oldest tree fossils discovered in England
Tree fossils belonging to what is now known as the world's oldest forest, dating back 390 million years, have been discovered in the southwest of England.
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Scientists found the fossils in sandstone cliffs near a park in the town of Minehead, on the southern shore of the Bristol Channel.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge announced that the newly discovered 390-million-year-old fossils predate the fossils in New York, previously thought to be the oldest, by 4 million years.
The research determined that the trees belong to the Devonian period, between 419 and 358 million years ago, when life on Earth moved from the oceans to land.
The lead author of the study, Neil Davies, a faculty member at the University of Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, stated that the trees, known as 'calamophyton', closely resembled palm trees but lacked leaves.
Davies noted that the trees were 2 to 4 meters tall, with branches emerging from thin, hollow trunks covered in slender, twig-like structures, and that the lower branches were shed as the trees grew.
'INSTEAD OF BEING PASSIVE...'
Explaining that the trees formed riverbanks and coastlines by trapping sediments in their root systems, Davies remarked, "In doing so, they were collecting water in certain places and creating these small channels; they were building their habitats instead of being passive."
Davies stated that the trees provided a moist habitat for invertebrates living on the forest floor in a hot and dry climate thanks to the branches that fell to the ground, and reported that the team found evidence of footprints and tail drags left by 5-6 centimeter-long arthropods.
It was noted that the cliffs where the fossils were found, known as the "Hangman Sandstone Formation," did not belong to England at that time, but rather to the region that is now Germany and Belgium.
The research was published in the Journal of the Geological Society.