LONDON – Maybe some of us have ever asked when the first forest appeared in Earth . A paleobotanist from Cardiff University in England named Chris Berry has the answer.
Launching from LiveScience on Thursday (7/7/2022), Chris Berry said that plants first grew about 470 million years ago and forests appeared more than a century later.
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During that interval, plant life slowly develops the genetic precursors necessary to produce trees, which then outperform other plants.
In 2019, Berry and colleagues reported on the oldest forest ever recorded, in the journal Current Biology. This forest, which was found in Cairo, New York, is said to have appeared in the early Devonian period, namely 385 million years ago.
“We don’t look at tree fossils, but we look at maps of exactly where the trees stand. So what we study is the ecology of the forest,” said Chris Berry.
Further, the fossil map shows Archeopteris, an ancient plant that had large woody roots and woody branches with leaves, like modern trees. The development of these early forests depended on the evolution of precursors to determine the nature of trees.
“I think the trigger was evolution, the development of anatomy that allowed for more complex branching. That kind of anatomy arrived once plants had developed the genetic tools to be able to build tree-like structures,” explains Chris Berry.
The early branching system, for example, was developed just before the Devonian, in the Silurian period or about 443.8 million to 419.2 million years ago. Whereas the first roots arrived in early Devon.
The properties of the tree then give it a great advantage, in particular the ability to outperform the competition for absorbing sunlight. However, some environmental changes may have changed some of the tree’s characteristics.
Megaphylls, leaves that are common today and characterized by branching veins, can grow much larger than their predecessors, thus absorbing more sunlight.
They first appeared about 390 million years ago but started small and spread only 30 million years later, in the late Devonian.
(wbs)
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