The ancient forest bears little resemblance to modern equivalents. "The diversity of the first rainforests was bizarre," says Falcon-Lang. He and his team found the remains of tree-sized clubmosses, horsetails and ferns — plants that today grow 2 or 3 metres tall, but in the ancient forest reached heights of up to 40 metres. Also surprising is the presence of remains from mangrove-like plants. "It was always assumed that mangrove plants had evolved fairly recently," says Falcon-Lang.Interesting stuff, but there's not one single bit of this article that is anything about any major, or even minor, problem for "Darwinism" - just the opposite, in fact, it gives more information for biologists and paleontologists to study even more details about evolution.
The forest probably had about 50 different plant species, although Falcon-Lang says that this is a conservative estimate. We probably lumped several similar species together as one," he explains. Modern rainforests are more diverse, containing as many as 500 plant species per hectare.
Imminent collapse
This discovery also shows that the fundamental processes that guide the complexity and evolution of forests has been around for hundreds of millions of years, says Scott Hocknull, a curator at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia. "Knowing this and how it has played out so many times in history will allow ecologists to better understand the complexity of modern forest systems," he adds.
Did you bother to follow the link in post #1?