When did the first forests appear on earth? Science Explain

KOMPAS.com- Even though this Earth is filled with forest everywhere and impressed forest is inhabitants on planet Earth, but in fact it is not so. So, when did forests first appear on Earth?

Forest is a land area dominated by trees.

Scientists claim that forests are the same as every species or ecosystem, and we humans also have a birthday or first time on this planet Earth.

So, when did the forest appear on Earth?

Reported from Live ScienceSaturday (2/7/2022), although plants first arrived on land about 470 million years ago, in fact tree and forests did not appear until nearly 390 million years ago.

Paleobotanist at Cardiff University in England, Chris Berry said, during the interval 470 million years to 390 million years ago, plant life slowly developed the genetic precursors needed to produce trees.

In 2019, Berry and colleagues reported on the oldest forest ever recorded, in the journal Current Biology. The oldest forest in the world is a forest found in Cairo, New York.

Also read: Evidence of World’s Oldest Forest Fire Found, 430 Million Years Old

The forest is called the oldest because of the characteristics of the existing trees and forests. There the wood, roots and leaves of trees are at the center of a population of dozens of plants that appeared much earlier than previously thought, in the early Devonian period, 385 million years ago.

For information, the Devonian is a period on the geological time scale that belongs to the Paleozoic era, and lasted between 416 ± 2.8 to 359.2 ± 2.5 million years ago.

Berry explained that in the Cairo forest site, they had not yet found the fossils of the ancient trees, but the team had determined where the possible locations of the ancient trees were.

“We didn’t see any tree fossils, but we did see a map of exactly where the trees stood,” he said.

“So what we study is forest ecology,” he added.

A study report from Binghamton University in New York said the map would help locate Archeopteris, an ancient plant that had large woody roots and woody branches with leaves, much like modern trees.

Previously, Science reports, the earliest known discoveries of Archaeopteris have placed the arrival of plants 20 million years later, which then hints at the existence or appearance of forests on Earth for the first time.

Also read: Leaf Fossil Study Unveils Borneo’s Past Forests

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