Fantastic Fossil Forest Found in USA

Encased in shale, above Illinois coal seams, scientists have discovered a fossilized forest -300-million-year-old – deep underground and believed to be in excess of 50 times larger than anything previously discovered of its kind.

The enormous forest – believed up to 100 miles across – contains not only complete trees, but also delicate ferns and even cockroach wings – all fossilized during the carboniferous period, an earlier age when global warming caused the rising water levels believed to have flooded the forests, burying them beneath sediment which over time became rock.

A full eight working coal mines are encompassed by the spread of this forest at depths between 250 to 800ft down, below ground and representing, over tens of square kilometres the largest fossil forest ever discovered, from a time when North America and Europe were both equatorial, covered with steamy tropical rain-forests and very warm.

These spectacular fossils shed light on the previously lost world of the  first rain-forests on earth, these compacted remains preserved above the coal seams – and built over compressed peat layers, so that after coal extraction the mine ceiling reveals them in all their glory.

It is the unusually complete delicate organic matter preservation that has led scientists to believe the forest to have been repeatedly flooded by rising water levels at the relevant time, reinforced by the discovery of a river – as wide as the Mississippi – right through the forested area.

The researchers have to date traced forest route some five-miles long, measuring huge fossilised trees that remain, after millions of years, still standing, surrounded by fallen leaves in their original soil locations, one measuring over 100ft long traced until disappearing into an untapped seam of coal.

Birds had not yet evolved at the period of ancient time involved, though insects are believed to have grown to immense sizes in the O2-rich environment, like dragonflies as big as Ravens and metre long millipedes. The hope is that further exploration might lead to ecosystem mapping, and analysis of global warming effects on an unprecedented scale, to help them with predictions for the future.