SCIENTISTS have found a 300-million-year-old tropical forest frozen in time in what is now a remote part of northern China.
The peat forest was swampy with a lower canopy of tree ferns beneath other, now-extinct trees soaring 24m above ground.
It also had vines and a few species of extinct Noeggerathiales, a little-understood group of spore-bearing trees believed to be related to ferns.
But the lush expanse, located by what is now Wuda in Inner Mongolia, was smothered in ash when a nearby volcano erupted some 298 million years ago.
At that time, dinosaurs had not yet emerged Replica Watches, the supercontinent Pangea was forming, and Wuda would have been located on the northwest corner of a large island straddling the equator, along with what is now northeast China and most of Korea.
The region no longer has a tropical climate and is now mined for coal, which helped the researchers find the forest – in three study sites that together cover more than 1000m sq.
"It’s marvellously preserved," University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn, a lead author of the study, said. "We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That’s really exciting."
Many of the species already had been discovered but scientists rarely get to study a Pompeii-like, fossilised array of plants that provide a snapshot of the flora from a distinct moment in time.
The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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