They discover an amazing fossilized forest that was hidden for 290 million years

A team of researchers discovered an upright fossilized forest estimated to be 290 million years old in southern Brazilconsidered a “window into the past” for the study of plant evolution.

The discovery of this set of 164 trunks of lycophytes (without fruits, flowers or seeds) of an extinct variety is “the most important in the southern hemisphere”, for quantity and quality of preservation, he explained. Thammy mutinygeologist and doctorate from the Federal University of Paraná, who led the research with collaborators from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the University of California.

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“With an estimated age of 290 million years, these plants represent very primitive forms in the history of the Earth”highlighted Mottin, who studies the post-glacial period, in which the climate became warmer and more conducive to the emergence of dense forests like this one.

View of fossils found inside the rocks of a forest with 165 trees in Ortigueira, Paraná state, southern Brazil, on June 15, 2022. (Ricardo Chicarelli / AFP).

The discovery in the municipality of Ortigueirain the state of Paranagives “access to the way in which the first plants colonized the environment, how they were distributed in space (…) and the interaction with the environment”, among other points, he evaluated.

There were only two other similar finds in the southern hemisphere, but smaller, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul (south) and in Argentine Patagonia.

The Paraná forest was found at the end of 2018, when a route was opened in the area to give access to an industrial plant. Geologists went there to study the exposed rocks, but to their surprise, they stumbled upon a fossilized forest.

A man holds a fossil found inside the rocks of a forest with 165 trees in Ortigueira, Paraná state, southern Brazil. (Ricardo Chicarelli / AFP).

So began a long investigation, published in February in the scientific journal “Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology”, of the Dutch group Elsevier, and recently released by the Brazilian press.

The peculiar preservation of this forest was possible thanks to the fact that the trees “were quickly buried when they were alive, and were progressively covered by sediment, until they died of suffocation,” explained Mottin.

The event that “pretty much froze that forest the way it was” was a large flood of a river on whose banks the trees were found, the researchers determined.

Source: Elcomercio