Fossil offers view of early forests
Trees resembling modern palms may have populated the earliest forests, a 400-pound fossil from a New York quarry shows.
The 380-million-year-old tree grew 30 feet tall and, like a mushroom, reproduced with spores, scientists reported in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. The tree’s network of branches resembling fronds used light to make food.
Scientists reached the conclusion after studying a fossil of the tree’s crown, or top, discovered three years ago. Stumps of the same type of tree had been discovered, rooted as they were in life, in 1870 by workers blasting the sandstone quarry in Gilboa, in the Catskill Mountains southwest of Albany.
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