Albert Gnidican/NY State Museum
At 8 metres long, it had to be hauled out of the ground with a hydraulic lift normally reserved for dinosaurs. But this fossil formed around 385 million years ago – long before dinosaurs even existed.
It’s a tree from the Gilboa fossil forest, New York. The site – which contains the oldest trees in the fossil record – is well known to palaeontologists, who until now had only uncovered fossil tree stumps, leaving them guessing about the appearance of the tree tops.
Now they know: the trunk had large branches, with fronds similar to a modern-day tree fern – although they were unrelated to…
