The forest chase

[The forest is believed to be about 386m years old, which makes it older than the Amazon © David McNew/Getty Images]

This story starts with a bit of background. I keep track of things that I might want to read by catalogue entries like the one – picked more or less at random from a long list of same – at reference 1a. Entries of the form: title – author or authors – year of publication. As a rule, using such a string as a search term will turn up an Internet address for the paper, as in reference 1b. More often than not, this will quite quickly yield a free copy of the paper in the form of a pdf file, perhaps not quite the published version, but near enough for my purposes.

Then, yesterday morning, Day 4 of the kitchen, while opening up Microsoft’s Edge, I noticed the piece from the Microsoft news server Start – about on a par with the Daily Mail or the late lamented Titbits – about forests, a piece (reference 3) which had appeared in the online magazine Indy 100 (reference 2), headed up by the snap above.

Quite often when skimming or reading pieces of popular science like this one, I like to dig a bit deeper, to get a bit nearer the horse’s mouth, as it were. And quite often the author of the piece either provides a link or a reference – but not in this case. However, the snap above and a careless skimming prompted the thought that this was a real forest which had been in situ for hundreds of millions of years, which was interesting – if preposterous with hindsight. So I did want to dig. So I tried Bing with the search term ‘Binghamton University, New York State Museum and Cardiff forest Catskill Mountains 2019’.

Top of the list was reference 4a from Cardiff University, a slightly longer version of the story at reference 3. But at least it was clear from their snap, included above, that we were talking archaeology rather than botany. However, no reference here either, just the name of the journal in question ‘Current Biology’. It was also clear that this was old news, five year old news, rather than new news – with what might be called filler pieces in news feeds quite often dating back some years.

There was a slight diversion here while I installed something called the AV1 Video Extension from the Microsoft Store.

I tried searching the journal at reference 5, but, in the absence of a proper link, failed to find the relevant article.

For once in a while, references 6 and 7 both failed me.

But I did get to the short paper at reference 8, where the author Christopher Berry, from Cardiff, is one of the authors of the missing paper. A handy introduction to the subject, built on the ancient Chinese forest of reference 9. From there it did not take too long to get to reference 10, the US forest in question, near a place in New York State called Cairo. 

[In situ lycopsid, above, with attached stigmarian root system, below left, from Joggins, Nova Scotia, Canada] 

Along the way, I turned up the striking picture included above of a fossil tree with roots at Wikipedia.

And the short book, snapped above, from the Gilboa Historical Society, which had I been able to pick it up for a song, might have been of interest. But, for once, none of Amazon, Abebooks or eBay knew anything about it – although they did turn up some fantasy fiction involving ancient forests.

I have now engaged with reference 10 (below) and know something more about the evolution of trees (above) than I did, with this particular forest being around at an important point in evolution of modern trees from wetland ferns – the point at which, inter alia, they acquired the proper perennial, woody roots needed to feed a serious biological enterprise.

With the evolution of modern plants coming rather later than the evolution of modern animals. The latter kicking off with the Cambrian explosion of 500mya, the former only with the Devonian explosion of 400mya, 100my later.

With this particular forest being overlaid by strata containing a lot of fossil fish, so wiped out by water at some point.

At which point I go back to my starting point, reference 3, to find it a fair summary. The writer had done his homework. Pity about the opening snap.

Meanwhile, downstairs, work on the kitchen proceeds.

Odds and ends

At one point, I wanted to recover the caption to the opening snap. Searching the Indy 100 website did not work, but I was able to get the Internet address of the piece fast enough from my Edge history.

At another point, I came across reference 11 and BingUNews. How is it that the Microsoft Intellectual Property Rights department have not closed them down for trespassing on Bing territory?

I do not know whether the chequered background of the evolutionary tree above which sometimes appears (above left) is some by-product of Microsoft’s version of the SVG image format (scalable vector graphics) or some cunning wheeze to protect copyright. But Powerpoint’s usually clever remove background feature was, on this occasion, rather destructive (above right). One could put it all back together again, but it would be a bit tedious and probably not altogether satisfactory.

But I do notice that if I focus on the left hand panel and then switch to the right hand panel, I get faint white patches where the images should be. I suppose some sort of retinal afterimage. 

Bing suggests that there are quite a lot of these fossil forests scattered across the world, including a respectable number from here in the UK.

According to reference 8, reference 9 describes a spectacular new forest of lycophyte trees in China, dating from around 350mya. Lycophytes could be big trees, as high as 50m – compared with the 90m of a big Wellingtonia of today – and form the bulk of the Carboniferous tropical wetland coal deposits which fuelled the industrial revolution across Great Britain, Europe and the United States.

I note in passing that the reproductive arrangements of these lycophytes, with their spores, are very different from our own, with eggs.

While in the margins of posting this, I came across reference 12. Not very encouraging!

References

Reference 1a: Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120 – John A. Johnson – 2014.

Reference 1b: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656614000506. 

Reference 2: https://www.indy100.com/. A news feed from the Independent stable, seemingly owned by a mixture of Arab and Russian money.

Reference 3: The world's oldest forest dating hundreds of millions of years old has been discovered – Alex Daniel, Indy 100 – 2024.

Reference 4a: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/1739669-scientists-uncover-worlds-oldest-forest.  

Reference 4b: Scientists uncover world’s oldest forest: Scientists have discovered remnants of the world’s oldest fossil forest in a sandstone quarry in Cairo, New York – Cardiff University – 2019. 19 December 2019.

Reference 5: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/home. 

Reference 6: https://www.researchgate.net/.

Reference 7: https://www.academia.edu/.

Reference 8: Palaeobotany: The Rise of the Earth’s Early Forests – Christopher M. Berry – 2019.

Reference 9: The Most Extensive Devonian Fossil Forest with Small Lycopsid Trees Bearing the Earliest Stigmarian Roots – Deming Wang, Min Qin, Le Liu, Lu Liu, Yi Zhou, Yingying Zhang, Pu Huang, Jinzhuang Xue, Shihui Zhang, Meicen Meng – 2019.

Reference 10: Mid-Devonian Archaeopteris Roots Signal Revolutionary Change in Earliest Fossil Forests – William E. Stein, Christopher M. Berry, Jennifer L. Morris, Linda VanAller Hernick, Frank Mannolini, Charles Ver Straeten, Ed Landing, John E.A. Marshall, Charles H. Wellman, David J. Beerling, Jonathan R. Leake – 2019.

Reference 11: https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3780/the-first-trees-preserving-the-worlds-oldest-forest-in-upstate-new-york. 

Reference 12: The era of the unfixable problem: Refugee flows, low birth rates and left-behind regions persist because there is no answer, not because politicians are useless – Janan Ganesh, Financial Times – 2024. 

Reference 13: https://youtu.be/KiBt8ujNtlc. But maybe there is an answer to this one - although it remains to be seen whether I get to be allowed in.