JAKARTA – Mystery about when forest first appeared on Earth has now been revealed. A paleobotanist from Cardiff University in England named Chris Berry has the answer.
Prepared from Live Science, Wednesday (6/7/2022), Chris Berry said that plants first grew about 470 million years ago and forests appeared more than a century later.
During that interval, plant life slowly developed the genetic precursors needed to produce trees, and then outperformed other plants.
In 2019, Berry and colleagues reported on the oldest forest ever recorded, in the journal Current Biology.
This forest, found in Cairo, New York, is said to have appeared in the early Devonian period, 385 million years ago.
“We don’t look at tree fossils, but we see a map of exactly where the trees stand. So what we’re studying is the ecology of the forest,” said Berry.
Furthermore, it is said that the fossil map shows Archeopteris, an ancient plant that had large woody roots and woody branches with leaves, like modern trees.
The development of this early forest, relied on the evolution of predecessors to determine the nature of the tree.
“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,” he explained.
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. Meanwhile, the first roots appeared in early Devonian.
The properties of the tree then provide a great advantage, particularly the ability to overcome 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.
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