Monday, April 23, 2007

Life when we weren't here

I love stories like these:

Researchers have uncovered a 300-million-year–old-fossilised rainforest, buried deep below ground in a coal mine in Illinois, US. It is by far the largest such forest ever found and provides an unprecedented look at the ecology of one of the world's earliest tropical forests.

Palaeobiologists from the US National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington DC, US, and the University of Bristol in the UK found a bizarre menagerie of extinct plants including club moss that grew a metre thick and more than 40 m high. The fossils were found nearly 100 metres underground at the Riola and Vermilion Grove mines in Vermilion County, Illinois.

The forest was buried in mud 300 million years ago when a large earthquake or other catastrophic event caused the entire region to suddenly drop below sea level. The fossilised forest lay preserved on top of a layer of coal that, when removed by miners, left the ancient forest visible on the mine ceiling.

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8 comments:

Steve Bates said...

Thanks, ellroon; I had missed that story.

The late and much-lamented Stephen Jay Gould always told us (I am paraphrasing here) that the tree of life was short, broad (lots of branches at each level), and ruthlessly pruned. As evidence, he cited the Burgess Shale, a selection of which I have seen in one of the national museums in DC, probably the National Museum of Natural History. (No, what I saw wasn't a *ahem* natural selection...) The discovery of the fossils in the Burgess Shale was one of the first such discoveries to lead scientists to understand that things once lived which do not fit into today's classification system at all, because they have no descendants... and that such things may well outnumber the species we see today.

Short, broad, and ruthlessly pruned... all of us should take note.

Sinfonian said...

Unpossible!

The Earth is only 6,000 years old! Just ask James Dobson! He knows everything.

;)

ellroon said...

I'm reading Bill Bryson's delightful book: "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" in which he warns us that we are truly outliers in life's many forms, (bacteria and molds win for diversity and quantity).

And he warns us that extinctions happens frequently.

Steve Bates said...

Well, ellroon, humans are outliers; then there are the neocons, who are out-and-out liars...

If I recall correctly, the typical lifetime of a species, as evidenced by the geological record, is a few million years; that would place Homo sapiens somewhere between youth and early middle age. But if ever a species has done everything possible to shorten its own span on this Earth, it's H. sapiens. Truly, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

ellroon said...

Yes, Pogo. You are right.

ellroon said...

And Dobson is a massive twit.

Sorghum Crow said...

Very nice. But it's a LIE, Elvis put those fossils there when he rode his dinosaur over to visit Adam and Steve in the Garden of Eden.

ellroon said...

I thought Elvis was with Osama and Kenny Boy in Paraguay waiting for Georgie to be done preznitin'....