A rare 3-D tree fossil may be the earliest glimpse at a forest understory

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A rare 3-D tree fossil may be the earliest glimpse at a forest understory
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The 350-million-year-old tree, which was wider than it was tall thanks to a mop-top crown of 3-meter-long leaves, would look at home in a Dr. Seuss book.

tree looks like it came straight out of Dr. Seuss’. But this isn’t a truffula come to life. It’s a 3-D rendering of a 350 million-year-old fossil that shows something very few other fossils in the world ever have —Current Biology“When I first saw , I was gobsmacked,” says geologist Robert Gastaldo of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. “Finding this … it made me think we should buy lottery tickets. That’s how rare it is.” — all of which come from what was once a lake in New Brunswick, Canada.

“This is something remarkable,” says botanist Mihai Tomescu of California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, who was not involved in this study. “It fills a gap within our picture of what forest structure looked like in the Mississippian.”skinny trunk , which may have helped the tree maximize photosynthesis in the forest understory.

Using the fossil and a computer graphics program called Blender, the researchers created a 3-D digital reconstruction of what they think the tree would have looked like. It was only about half the height of a full-grown giraffe, but its crown was large, possibly as wide as 6 meters with leaves as long as 3 meters, the researchers estimate.

could be the earliest known evidence of a subcanopy tree, which would have created a layered forest. Trees trying to live in the subcanopy would have had to adapt, in this case, by using large leaves to capture as much sunlight as possible. This new forest layer would have also altered the ecosystems around it by creating shelter and humidity, by shading sunlight and trapping evaporating groundwater.

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