A 298-million-year-old fossil forest was found in a coal mine near Wuda in northern China. As for the Roman city of Pompeii, this site has also been preserved up to the present day thanks to the ashes that quickly covered it following the eruption of a nearby volcano.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
A fossil forest old of 298 million years was found in a coal mine near Naked, in northern China. As for the Roman city of Pompei, even this site has been preserved up to the present day thanks to the ashes that quickly covered it following the eruption of a nearby volcano.
The extraordinary discovery, published by the National Academy of Sciences, has been the subject of studies by the paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn, from the University of Pennsylvania and a team of Chinese colleagues: Jun Wang | of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhang Yi of Shenyang Normal University e Zhuo Feng della Yunnan University.
“The forest has remained perfectly preserved,” said Pfefferkorn. “We found some small trees with perfectly preserved leaves, branches, trunks. This is really exciting ”.
The huge fossil dates back to the era Paleozoic and more precisely at the beginning of the geological period known as Permian, during which the terrestrial continental plates were still moving towards each other to form the super continent Pangea.
Due to the mining activities of the mine, a large part of the finds has been lost. However, the researchers were able to examine approximately 1.000m2 of stratified ash in three different sites, one next to the other. Altogether they identified six groups of trees including that of the Noeggerathiales, progenitors of the current ferns.
Finally, the researchers made use of the painter's collaboration Ren Yugao to make accurate reconstructions of all three sites.
Lorenzo DeRitis
photo: Ren Yugao
