Volcanic ash buried a swampy forest roughly 298 million years ago, preserving a wealth of detail about the region's flora. Scientists have uncovered the fossilized plants in what is now northern China.
Jun Wang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing, Hermann Pfefferkorn at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and their team reconstructed the ancient ecosystem by analysing the positions of individual plants across three sites (an artist's impression pictured) that cover a combined area of more than 1,000 square metres. Besides sporting a broad, low canopy of tree ferns, the peat forest contained trees that looked like feather dusters and reached heights of 25 metres or more. The team also found fossils of vines and three species of Noeggerathiales — small spore-bearing trees thought to be close relatives of the earliest ferns.
Proc. Natl Acad. Sci USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1115076109 (2012)
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Ancient forest preserved in ash. Nature 483, 9 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/483009d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/483009d
