The money quote:
“... but if I didn’t tell you that it was over 50,000 years old, you wouldn’t know it,” said Kristine DeLong, the Louisiana State University researcher
Call me skeptical but Mobile Bay and southward is full of dead trees washed out of the delta.
This drowned forest was above sea level over 10,000 years ago. It was covered with mud and sea water at the end of the Ice Age, and was oxygen deprived all these millenia, until hurricane Katrina moved all the covering, exposing the drowned trees.
This isn’t so rare along coastal waterways. There exist drowned forests off the northwest coast of North America, caused by the same thing that affected those trees off of Mississippi — the rising sea level at the end of the Ice Age.