Posted on 04/23/2007 8:11:31 PM PDT by A. Pole
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 . The discovery and details of the forest are published in the May issue of the journal Geology.
“We’re looking at one instance in time over a large area. It’s literally a snapshot in time of a multiple square mile area,” said study team member Scott Elrick of the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS).
Forest find
Over millions of years as sediments and plant material pile up, layer upon layer, the resulting bands become time indicators with the newest, youngest layer on the top and the oldest layer at the bottom. Typically geologists peel away a vertical slice of rocky material to look at material, including fossils, over a period of time.
A coal mine offers a unique view of the past. Instead of a time sequence, illuminated in the layer upon layer of sediments, the roof of an underground mine reveals a large area within one of those sediment layers, or time periods.
Miners in Illinois are used to seeing a few plant fossils strewn along a mine’s ceiling, but as they burrowed farther into this one, the sheer density and area covered by such fossils struck them as phenomenal, Elrick said.
That’s when they called paleobotanist Howard Falcon-Lang from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and William DiMichele, a curator of fossil plants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
"It was an amazing experience. We drove down the mine in an armored vehicle, until we were a hundred meters below the surface,” Falcon-Lang said. “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.”
Forest snapshot
Here’s what the miners and other scientists saw underground: Relatively narrow passageways wind through the “cave,” marked off with stout 100-foot-wide pillars to ensure the roof doesn’t collapse.
“It’s like in some bizarre Roman temple with tons of Corinthian pillars that are 100 feet across and only six feet tall,” Elrick told LiveScience. “As you’re walking down these passageways you see these pillars of coal on either side of you and above you—imagine an artist’s canvas painted a flat grey and that is sort of what the grey shale above the coal looks like.”
The largest ever found, the fossil forest covers an area of about 40 square miles, or nearly the size of San Francisco. This ancient assemblage of flora is thought to be one of the first rainforests on Earth, emerging during the Upper Carboniferous, or Pennsylvanian, time period that extended from about 310 million to 290 million years ago.
A reconstruction of the ancient forest showed that like today’s rainforests, it had a layered structure with a mix of plants now extinct: Abundant club mosses stood more than 130-feet high, towering over a sub-canopy of tree ferns and an assortment of shrubs and tree-sized horsetails that looked like giant asparagus.
[the rest of the article at Yahoo News ... ]
My family had a coal mine up until 1960.
There were leaves on the rocks on the ceiling.
I saw one piece of coal that had a knot in it.
300 million year old rainforest in Illinois? It can’t be. I thought Al Gore invented global warming in January 2001.
Neat! Thanks for sharing.
ILLINOIS USED to be a RAIN FOREST.....don’t tell GoreBull!
Pretty cool, wish there were more pictures!
Bushs Fault!
In this photo released Monday, April 23, 2007 by the Illinois State Geological Survey shows a fossil, part of a fossilized rain forest discovered in coal mines in Vermilion County in east central Illinois. Geologists say the area dates to the Pennsylvania Age, 300 million years ago. Researchers are probing the fossilized area which covers about 15 square miles, all more than 200 feet below ground, and is probably the largest intact rain forest from that period ever studied. (AP Photo/Illinois State Geological Survey)
Which was controlled by a prehistoric Daley family.
A knot? Tell me about it.
i wonder if that’s why the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.
Why? Simple we know it aggravates you, we had a meeting awhile ago and decided to do this. Everyone is in on it..friends..family...everyone, that is except John McCain but he’s just being a maverick.
For what it’s worth it was Jacques Chirac’s idea. So you can blame him...not that he cares.
I wonder, if someone had found an ancient coal mine in a rain forest, would it have made the news?
I refuse to call jungles rain forests.
Very cool article.
Here is a link off of the same article (Yahoo).
http://www.livescience.com/environment/070419_earth_timeline.html
Read it and you’ll see we are quite doomed due to GLOBAL WARMING!
Probably occurred around 4000 years ago during the flood of Noah. But anything important in make believe science must be at least 300-600 million years old to give it the illusional/delusional sugar coating it needs in order to fit into the completely and utter unprovable theory of evolution. First rule of junk science, make it so old as to be completely impossible to prove or disprove.
Why does everything have to be millions of years. The Mt. St Helens eruption changed the landscape in a day. Lakes were removed, rivers re routed and canyons were dug overnight.
Have you seen the iron hammer that was dug from a coal mine that was supposed to be millions of years old? How about the fossilized "foot" still in a cowboy boot manufactured in the 1950's that was dug out of a stream bed in Texas?
When people buy into this stuff, it just shows a lack of common sense. How many armadillo's remain on the side of the road long enough to be fossilized? It must happen quick to cut off the oxygen, and most likely the covering up is what killed them. If you find an animal that was obviously eaten, then the remains would have had to be covered within a short while after. Also, the covering would have to be several feet thick or made of something like clay or molten rock. Otherwise the organic material would still decay over a relatively short time.
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