The fossilised remains of a 390-million-year-old forest – the earliest forest ever discovered – have been found in cliffs close to one of Britain’s best-loved holiday camps
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Being fully entertained by the fairground rides and swimming pool complexes at the massive Butlin’s holiday camp in Minehead, Somerset, it’s unlikely that many guests would stop to wonder whether the countryside around them was harbouring the fossilised remains of the world’s earliest forest. But, a new study published this week in the journal of the Geological Society reveals that the town of Minehead is indeed sitting beside the fossilised 390-million-year-old remains of the world’s earliest known forest.
Prior to this remarkable discovery, the earliest known forest was a 386-million-year-old forest found in New York State. This new forest, which was found in sandstone cliffs close to Minehead’s famous Butlin’s holiday camp and extends down into the neighbouring county of Devon, is made up of fossilised Calamophyton trees, which scientists say resemble palm trees at first sight. However, they were far less sophisticated and were more of a prototype of the sort of trees we are more familiar with today. Differences between these ancient trees and today include the Calamophyton trees having thin and hollow trunks instead of the solid wood trunks of today’s trees and, more bizarrely, instead of leaves, the branches of the Calamophyton were covered in hundreds of twig-like structures. As these relatively short trees (normally between two and four metres tall) grew, they shed their lower branches, which dropped lots of vegetation litter onto the floor, which in turn supported early forest floor invertebrates.
Dr Christopher Berry, a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences who identified the fossils, said: ‘These Calamophyton trees are the oldest fossil trees ever found in Britain and represent an as yet missing part of our vegetational history.’
The newly discovered forest dates to the Devonian Period, between 419 and 358 million years ago, which was a period in which life left the water and started to expand onto land. The reason the period is named after the county of Devon is because of marine rocks emblematic of the period and which were discovered off the Devon coastline. The part of the coastline where the forest was discovered is known as the Hangman Sandstone Formation, and interestingly, during the Devonian Period, this region wasn’t attached to the rest of England but was connected to parts of Belgium and Germany, where similar Devonian fossils have been discovered. It was then shifted along a huge geological fault during the Carboniferous period at a time of crustal compression and faulting when Africa collided with Europe.
The study’s first author, Professor Neil Davies of Cambridge University’s Department of Earth Sciences, said: ‘The Devonian period fundamentally changed life on Earth. It also changed how water and land interacted with each other, since trees and other plants helped stabilise sediment through their root systems, but little is known about the very earliest forests. The evidence contained in these fossils preserves a key stage in Earth’s development, when rivers started to operate in a fundamentally different way than they had before, becoming the great erosive force they are today.’
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