The diminutive trees of the Xinhang forest likely lived in a swampy environment near a coast, as shown here in an illustration.Image by Deming Wang

By Maya Wei-Haas
August 8, 2019

The spindly trees had surprisingly complex roots—setting the stage for the formation of coal seams still mined today

The narrow rods peeking out from the walls of the clay mine didn’t initially look like much. But as more of the spindly fossils appeared, paleobotanists Deming Wang and Min Qin soon realized they were in the midst of an ancient forest.

Discovered near the town of Xinhang, China, the fossilized tree trunks date back to about 365 million years ago, and cover at least 2.7 million square feet, which is roughly the size of 47 American football fields. This means they now represent the oldest forest yet found in Asia, the researchers report today in the journal Current Biology.

“This is what fired the Industrial Revolution,” says Christopher Berry, a paleobotanist specializing in the rise of forests who was not part of the study team. “This is the basis of our present civilization; this little [root] structure, which we see for the first time in this forest.”

The Xinhang forest dates to a transformative time in arboreal history, when trees were rapidly inventing new ways to thrive in different environments. In the early Devonian, flora largely creeped across the landscape. If you could travel back some 416 million years, “you’d be wandering around just towering above all the plants,” says Ellen Currano, a paleobotanist at the University of Wyoming.

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