From the Devonian era but much like today’s forests:
The fossilized roots– footprints of an ancient landscape– belonged to trees with wood and leaves, similar to what we see today, the study says.
This find was made in Cairo, about 40 miles south of Albany. Previously, scientists thought a fossilized forest in Gilboa, New York, was the earliest, but the one in Cairo is two or three million years older and dramatically different…
The discovery provides a snapshot of one of the planet’s great transitional periods, between an earth with no forests and an earth that’s covered in forests, Berry said.
Kelly Murray, “The world’s oldest known fossil forest has been discovered in a quarry in upper New York state” at CNN
Funny the way those sudden transitions occur, just as if they were spring loaded or something… Nah, can’t be. At all costs, true science must stick to the the Darwinian claim:
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
… even when it is manifestly not plausible. Ah, the sacrifices people make for science…
Here’s the paper in Current Biology. (open access)
More soon.