Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY -- University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn has unearthed an ancient ecosystem preserved by volcanic ash far beneath the coal mines around Wuda, China.
Pfefferkorn, a professor in Penn's Department of Earth and Environmental Science, worked alongside three Chinese colleagues to make the discovery: Jun Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yi Zhang of Shenyang Normal University and Zhuo Feng of Yunnan University.
The discovery has been coined Pompeii-like by the researchers, due to its uncanny resemblance to the events of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, which was buried under a mass of volcanic ash for over 1,700 years before being accidentally rediscovered in 1749.
The ash that covered the forest allowed for a remarkable preservation of the plant life. Some plants fell almost directly where they had begun to grow nearly 300 million years ago.
"It's marvelously preserved," Pfefferkorn said. "We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That's really exciting."
The researchers also found some smaller trees with leaves, branches, trunk and cones intact, preserved in their entirety.
Pfefferkorn and his group were able to date the layer of ash to approximately 298 million years ago, dating it back to the beginning of a geological period called the Permian. In the Permian era, Earth's continental plates were still moving together, forming the supercontinent Pangea.
In each of the three study sites, Pfefferkorn and his fellow scientists identified six different groups of trees. A lower canopy was formed by tree ferns, while some, much taller trees -- Sigillaria and Cordaites -- reached as high as 80 feet above the ground. In addition, researchers found specimens of an extinct group of trees called Noeggerathiales. These trees had been previously identified from sites in North America and Europe, but appeared to be much more common in these Asian sites.
While the findings are astounding, Pfefferkorn downplayed the significance of the group, again relating the experience to the ancient Roman discovery.
"It's like Pompeii: Pompeii gives us deep insight into Roman culture, but it doesn't say anything about Roman history in and of itself," Pfefferkorn said. "But on the other hand, it elucidates the time before and the time after. This finding is similar. It's a time capsule and therefore it allows us now to interpret what happened before or after much better."
Image Credit: University of Pennsylvania
