Forest Primeval: The oldest known trees finally gain a crown
By Sid Perkins
For more than a century, the world’s earliest known trees were represented only by preserved stumps. Now, fossils recently unearthed in upstate New York reveal the tops of those trees.
In the early 1870s, paleontologists discovered fossilized stumps in a riverbed near Gilboa, N.Y. In the 1920s, quarrymen excavated dozens more nearby. Those 0.5-to-1.5-meter relics, preserved upright in rocks about 385 million years old, are considered to be the remains of Earth’s oldest forest, says William E. Stein, a paleobotanist at Binghamton (N.Y.) University.