Earth's First Rainforest Discovered in Illinois Coalmine

This is an amazing discovery, down hundreds of meters in a coalmine this forest coverd 10,000 hectacres and is supposed to give a good picture of what a rainforest looked like 300 million years ago... Awesome!

LINK


A spectacular fossilised forest has transformed our understanding of the ecology of the Earth's first rainforests. It is 300 million years old.

The forest is composed of a bizarre mixture of extinct plants: abundant club mosses, more than 40 metres high, towering over a sub-canopy of tree ferns, intermixed with shrubs and tree-sized horsetails. Nowhere elsewhere on the planet is it possible to (literally) walk through such an extensive swathe of Carboniferous rainforest

Here are two more sources for the discovery:

Giant moss that towered above the trees

Huge mosses soaring more than 130ft into the air dwarfed everything else in a rainforest that was swallowed by the sea 300 million years ago.

Palaeontologists have found the fossilised remains of gigantic club mosses alongside thousands of other plants in an extraordinary frozen forest.

Scientists Find Fossilized Rainforest in Coal Mine

Scientists exploring a mine have uncovered a natural Sistine chapel showing not religious paintings, but incredibly well-preserved images of sprawling tree trunks and fallen leaves that once breathed life into an ancient rainforest.

Replete with a diverse mix of extinct plants, the 300-million-year-old fossilized forest is revealing clues about the ecology of Earth’s first rainforests.

This is just stunning, so far the scientists have identified 50 species of Carboniferous era plants at the discovery.

ahhh cool!! how come this crap never makes the "mainstream media" !!! anyway cool good find!

Very interesting indeed. This period always has interested me.

Any possibility of Critter remains?

It should be plausible that with with all the fossilized vegetation, there would be some critter fossils of some type found within the layers.

Cool find

Just think of what they may find preserved within the many layers of growth.

Jurassic Park anyone?

Wow, giant moss that grew larger than trees, giant isnects, land lobsters... The more I read up on the past, the more bizzarre it gets!

Something at the end of the article caught my eye...

At the time of the earthquake, Europe and North America were joined into a supercontinent over the equator. Similar fossils, though on a much smaller scale, were noted in mines in Britain in the 19th century but were reburied.

Why was such a fantasitic find reburied? Did they find something under there that was too damming to the scientific community? [lovecraft] Or was something so horrifying that it HAD to be buried? [/lovecraft]

Originally posted by Cowboy Clint
Wow, giant moss that grew larger than trees, giant isnects, land lobsters... The more I read up on the past, the more bizzarre it gets!

Something at the end of the article caught my eye...

At the time of the earthquake, Europe and North America were joined into a supercontinent over the equator. Similar fossils, though on a much smaller scale, were noted in mines in Britain in the 19th century but were reburied.

Why was such a fantasitic find reburied? Did they find something under there that was too damming to the scientific community? [lovecraft] Or was something so horrifying that it HAD to be buried? [/lovecraft]

ew cool thought