A Fossilized Forest Creates a Picture of Our Ancient World
With the proof revealed by scientists, a craftsman portrayed El Bosque Petrificado Piedra Chamana as it would have looked well before people. Photograph: Mariah Slovacek/NPS-GIP
In the slopes outside the little town of Sexi, Peru, a fossil backwoods holds privileged insights about South America’s previous great many years prior.
At the point when we previously visited these frozen trees over 20 years prior, very little was thought about their age or how they came to be saved. We began by dating the stones and contemplating the volcanic cycles that protected the fossils. From that point, we started to bits together the Based narrative of the woodland, beginning from the day 39 million years prior when a well of lava emitted in northern Peru.
Debris descended upon the backwoods that day, taking leaves from the trees. Then, at that point streams of ashy material traveled through, severing the trees and conveying them like logs in a waterway to the space where they were covered and saved. A long period of time later, after the current Andes rose and conveyed the fossils with them, the stones were presented to the powers of disintegration, and the fossil woods and leaves again came around.
This frozen backwoods, El Bosque Perificado Piedra Chamana, is the principal fossil woodland from the South American jungles to be concentrated exhaustively. It is assisting scientists with preferring us to comprehend the historical backdrop of the megadiverse timberlands of the New World jungles and the previous environments and conditions of South America.
By analyzing slim cuts of frozen wood under magnifying instruments, we had the option to outline the blend of trees that flourished here well before people existed.
test the variety of the forested areas by depending on highlights that could be seen with the unaided eye or with little hand-held magnifying instruments, things like the game plan and width of the vessels that convey water upwards inside the tree or the presence of tree rings. Then, at that point we cut little squares from the examples, and from those we had the option to get ready petrographic dainty areas in three planes. Each plane gives us an alternate perspective on the tree’s life systems. They permit us to see many definite highlights identifying with the vessels, the wood filaments and the living-tissue segment of the wood. Based on these features, we were able to consult past studies and use information in wood databases to find out what types of trees were present.
Pieces of information in the forested areas and leaves
A significant number of the fossil trees have direct relations in the present-day marsh tropical woods of South America.
One has highlights common of lianas, which are woody plants. Others seem to have been huge shade trees, including family members of present day Ceiba. We additionally discovered trees that are notable in the backwoods of South America like Hura, or sandbox tree; Anacardium, a kind of cashew tree; and Ochroma, or balsa. The biggest example at the Sexi site — a fossil trunk about 2.5 feet (75 cm) in distance across — has highlights like those of Cynometra, a tree in the vegetable family.
The revelation of a mangrove, Avicennia, was more proof that the woodland was developing at a low rise close to the ocean before the Andes rose.
The fossil leaves we discovered gave another insight to the past. All had smooth edges, instead of the toothed edges or projections that are more normal in the cooler environments of the mid-to high scopes, demonstrating that the backwoods experienced very warm conditions. We realize the backwoods was filled at a time in the geologic past when the Earth was a lot hotter than today.
Although there are many similarities between the petrified forest and present-day Amazonian forests, some of the fossil trees have anatomical features that are unusual in the South American tropics. One is a species of Dipterocarpaceae, a group that has only one other representative in South America but that is common today in the rainforests of South Asia
An artist brings the forest to life
Our concept of what this ancient forest was like expanded when we had an opportunity to collaborate with an artist at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado to reconstruct the forest and landscape. Other locations with fossil trees include Florissant, which has giant petrified redwood stumps, and Petrifed Forest National Park in Arizona.
Working with the artist, Mariah Slovacek, who is also a paleontologist, made us think critically about many things: What would the forest have looked like? Were the trees evergreen or deciduous? Which were tall and which shorter? What would they have looked like in flower or in fruit?
We knew from our investigation that many of the fossil trees were likely to have been growing in a streamside or flooded-forest location, but what about the vegetation growing back from the watercourses on higher ground? Would the hills have been forested or supported drier-adapted vegetation? Mariah researched today’s relatives of the trees we identified for clues to what they might have looked like, such as what shape and colour their flowers or fruits might have been.
