Illinois in USA has been hiding under it’s ground, rainforests for long 300 million years! Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from the University of Bristol, UK and US colleagues have unearthed the amazing fossilized forests while workings at a coalmine there.
How the ecology of the Earth’s first rainforests was? The spectacular findings of the fossilized forest must have met this query of the impertinent minds of the researchers. With an extensive swathe of Carboniferous rainforest, it was never possible to walk through the forest, and hence must have been left virgin during its period. It perhaps has never been romped by the ancient animals.
The fossilized forest is found to be composed of a bizarre mixture of extinct plants – which include abundant club mosses, which were more than 40 meters high! The mosses used to tower over a sub-canopy of tree ferns, intermixed with shrubs and tree-sized horsetails.
It was a major earthquake that occurred 300 million years ago and has eventually preserved the fossilized forests. Following the quake, the whole region dropped below sea level leading the forest to get buried in mud, hence preserving it forever.
Dr Howard Falcon-Lang said,
It was an amazing experience. We drove down the mine in an armoured vehicle, until we were a hundred metres below the surface. The fossil forest was rooted on top of the coal seam, so where the coal had been mined away the fossilized forest was visible in the ceiling of the mine.
We walked for miles and miles along pitch-black passages with the fossil forest just above our heads. We were able to make a map of the forest by the light of our miner’s lamps.