Trees also have birthdays, just like any other type of living thing.
After the arrival of the first land plants, forests evolved for millions of years, waiting for the precursors of roots and branches to arrive and for carbon dioxide levels to reach the right levels.
From the tallest plants on earth, California's redwoods , to the largest tropical rainforest on earth, the Amazon , stately forests seem eternal. But like every species or ecosystem, they too have a birth date. In fact, although plants first appeared on land 470 million years ago, trees and forests only appeared nearly 390 million years ago.
Chris Berry, a paleobotanist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science that during this interval, plant life slowly evolved the genetic precursors needed to produce trees, and then those trees Competes other plants.
In 2019, Berry and colleagues reported the oldest forest ever recorded (opens in a new tab) in the journal Current Biology. The forest, discovered in Cairo, New York, shows that the characteristics of trees and forests - namely wood, roots and leaves among dozens of species of flora - appeared "far earlier than before," the researchers said in their study. "Doubt": In the early Devonian 385 million years ago.
Here we see a man examining the growth rings on a chopped tree to find out how old it is.
Berry said the Cairo site preserved fossilized root systems of ancient trees, pinpointing where they appeared in life. "We didn't see fossils of the trees, but we saw a map showing the exact location of the trees," he said. "So what we learned was the ecology of the forest.
That fossil "map" featured Archaeopteris, an ancient plant, according to a report from Binghamton University in New York (opens in a new tab) , it had "large woody roots and leafy woody branches" like modern trees, reports the journal Science (opens in a new tab), after the earliest known discovery of Archaeopteris put the plant's arrival to the test. The date is set at 20 million years later.
Berry said the development of these early forests depended on the evolution of precursors that defined tree characteristics. "I think the trigger was evolution that allowed for more complex branching anatomy," he said. The development of . Berry said this anatomy emerged once plants evolved a genetic toolbox "able to build" tree-like structures, for example, according to two reports from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (opens in a new tab). ), early branching systems developed just before the Devonian period, the Silurian period (443.8 million to 419.2 million years ago), while the first root systems arrived in the early Devonian period. After that, trees were given their main characteristics. The advantages, especially the ability to absorb sunlight beyond competition, may have been possible due to some environmental changes. Giant leaves are common today and are characterized by branching veins that can be compared with those of their predecessors. grow much larger, thus absorbing more sunlight, according to a 2001 study in the journal Nature (opens in a new tab) and a 2021 PBS show "Eons" (opens in a new tab) , they first appeared about 390 million years ago, but started small and did not become widespread until the end of the Devonian period 30 million years later.
The study found that the reason for this delay was high carbon dioxide (CO2). levels made the Earth too hot for the large, giant leaves. They simply absorbed too much sunlight and overheated. However, carbon dioxide levels dropped dramatically during the Devonian period, doubly benefiting large-leafed plants from this reduction in greenhouse gases. Cooling the planet, large, giant-leafed plants can pack in more air holes, called stomata, to absorb higher levels of declining carbon dioxide. Such leaves could help fuel the forest revolution.
