World’s oldest fossil forest uncovered in US - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

World’s oldest fossil forest uncovered in US.

Scientists have discovered remnants of the world’s oldest fossil forest — an extensive network of trees around 386 million years old — in a sandstone quarry in the U.S.

The fossil forest in Cairo would have spread from New York all the way into Pennsylvania and beyond, according to the researchers from Binghamton University, and New York State Museum in the U.S.
The forest is around 2 or 3 million years older than what was thought to be the world’s oldest forest at Gilboa, also in New York State and around 40 kilometres away from the Cairo site.

The finding, published in the journal Current Biology, throws new light on the evolution of trees and the transformative role they played in shaping the world we live in today.
The team, including researchers from Cardiff University in the UK, mapped over 3,000 square metres of the forest at the abandoned quarry in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in the Hudson Valley.
“It is surprising to see plants which were previously thought to have had mutually exclusive habitat preferences growing together on the ancient Catskill delta,” said co-author of the study Chris Berry from Cardiff University.
“This would have looked like a fairly open forest with small to moderate sized coniferous-looking trees with individual and clumped tree-fern like plants of possibly smaller size growing between them,” Mr. Berry said.
The research shows that the forest was home to at least two types of trees.
Cladoxylopsids, primitive tree-fern-like plants, lacked flat green leaves, and grew in vast numbers at Gilboa, while Archaeopteris had a conifer-like woody trunk and frond-like branches which had green flattened leaves.
A single example of a third type of tree was also uncovered, which remained unidentified but could possibly have been a lycopod, the researchers said.
All these trees reproduced using only spores rather than seeds, they said.
The team also reported a ‘spectacular’ and extensive network of roots which was more than eleven metres in length in some places and belonged to the Archaeopteris trees.
It is these long-lived woody roots, with multiple levels of branching and small, short-lived perpendicular feeder roots, that transformed the interactions of plants and soils, the researchers said.
The roots were pivotal to the co-evolution of forests and the atmosphere, they said.
The researchers said that the Cairo forest is older than the one at Gilboa because the fossils were lower down in the sequence of rocks that occur in the Catskill mountains. (Source: The Hindu)


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World’s oldest fossil forest uncovered in US

World's oldest artwork uncovered in Indonesian cave: study - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

World's oldest artwork uncovered in Indonesian cave: study.

The limestone cave painting dated back at least 43,900 years during the Upper Paleolithic period

An Indonesian cave painting that depicts a prehistoric hunting scene could be the world's oldest figurative artwork dating back nearly 44,000 years, pointing to an advanced artistic culture, according to new research.
Discovered two years ago on the island of Sulawesi, the 4.5 metre wide painting features wild animals being chased by half-human hunters wielding what appear to be spears and ropes, said the study published in Nature on December 11.
Using dating technology, the team at Australia's Griffith University said it had confirmed that the limestone cave painting dated back at least 43,900 years during the Upper Paleolithic period.
"This hunting scene is — to our knowledge — currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world," researchers said.
At least 40,000 years old
The discovery comes after a painting of an animal in a cave on the Indonesian island of Borneo was earlier determined to have been at least 40,000 years old.
For many years, cave art was thought to have emerged from Europe, but Indonesian paintings have challenged that theory. There are at least 242 caves or shelters with ancient imagery on Sulawesi alone, and new sites are being discovered annually, the team said.
In the latest dated scene, hunters are depicted in dark red colours with human bodies and the heads of animals including birds and reptiles.
The painting, which is in poor condition, suggests that a highly advanced artistic culture existed some 44,000 years ago, punctuated by folklore, religious myths and spiritual belief, the team said. "(The scene) may be regarded not only as the earliest dated figurative art in the world but also as the oldest evidence for the communication of a narrative in Palaeolithic art."
"This is noteworthy, given that the ability to invent fictional stories may have been the last and most crucial stage in the evolutionary history of human language and the development of modern-like patterns of cognition,"researchers said. (Source: The Hindu)


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World's oldest artwork uncovered in Indonesian cave: study.