Posted on 02/24/2012 5:39:14 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A 300-million-year-old forest has been found preserved by volcanic ash, just as the Roman town of Pompeii was.
The remarkable discovery was made near a coal mine at the city of Wuda in China, by a University of Pennsylvania scientist and Chinese researchers.
The study site is unique as it gives a snapshot of a moment in time. Because volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest over the course of only a few days, the plants were preserved as they fell, in many cases in the exact locations where they grew.
'It's marvellously preserved,' said Hermann Pfefferkorn, a paleobotanist from Penn's Department of Earth and Environmental Science.
'We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That's really exciting.'
The researchers also found some smaller trees with leaves, branches, trunk and cones intact, preserved in their entirety.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
The article Renfield linked to me has some pretty nice pics, I used just the one (and one was Getty, so it couldn’t be used); had I done my due diligence and looked for an earlier version, I’d probably have posted just the link in the ping message. :’)
;’)
This is obviously the remains of Lot’s wife, so this must be the actual site of Sodom and Gomorrah. /s
Oh! I was confused. I was referring to the thread posted by LibWhacker the other day which had just a drawing. Guess there are 3 separate posts on this :O
Haven’t been on the one by Renfield which apparently is the one you were referring to. and....so I got confusilgated. LOL!
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