With the roots still fixed in the substrate in southern Brazil , fossilized trees from 290 million years ago retain their upright position, which is rare.
A team of researchers has discovered an upright fossilized forest estimated to be 290 million years old in southern Brazil , considered 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, explained Thammy Mottin, geologist 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.
“With an estimated age of 290 million years, these plants represent very primitive forms in the history of the Earth,” said Mottin, who studies the post-glacial period, in which the climate became warmer and more conducive to the emergence of dense forests. like this.
The discovery in the municipality of Ortigueira, in the state of Paraná, gives “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, 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.
They died of suffocation
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 .
So began a long investigation, published in February in the scientific journal “Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology”, of the Dutch group Elsevier, and recently reported by the Brazilian press.
The peculiar preservation of this forest was possible because 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.
