Fossil Forest, Dorset: England’s 145 million-year-old tree stump fossils preserved by historical microbes

The Fossil Forest in Dorset is a 145 million-year-old clump of useless timber on the Jurassic Coast — a 95-mile-long (153 kilometers) stretch of shoreline in southern England plagued by fossils courting to the Jurassic interval (201 million to 145 million years in the past).

The Fossil Forest holds a few of the strangest fossils on the Jurassic Coast because of throngs of tiny, algae-like microbes that colonized the timber shortly after they died. Over the eons, these colonies trapped and encrusted particles of calcium carbonate onto the timber, constructing residing mats of limestone known as thrombolites which might be nonetheless seen at present.

The now-fossilized forest grew in the course of the finish of the Jurassic interval, at a time generally known as the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary. During this boundary, temperatures dropped and sea ranges fell, exposing recent land and forming coastal plains on which new life, together with timber, may thrive.

Ancient species of conifers, tree-ferns and cycads sprouted on what’s now the southern coast of England because the ocean retreated.

Related: 390 million-year-old fossilized forest is the oldest ever found

Flowering crops had not but advanced at this level in Earth’s historical past, however dinosaurs could properly have roamed the forest, in accordance with the web site Geology of the Wessex Coast, which is run by Ian West, a geologist and visiting scientist on the University of Southampton within the U.Ok.

The forest was short-lived as a result of sea ranges quickly rose once more, drowning the timber in salty water. But relatively than rot away, the roots and trunks had been preserved by microbes. Eventually, the timber’ trunks broke off, abandoning rounded mounds generally known as “algal burrs” that also sit on the shoreline and type the Fossil Forest.

A number of tree trunks have been discovered preserved alongside the Jurassic Coast, however none stay on the Fossil Forest web site. This is probably going as a result of guests in Victorian occasions plundered them, in accordance with the Jurassic Coast Trust.

The Fossil Forest’s algal burrs are situated midway up a cliff dealing with the English Channel. Most of the woody stays contained in the burrs belong to an historical sort of cypress known as Protocupressinoxylon, and these stays are nonetheless rooted in prehistoric soil, West wrote on Geology of the Wessex Coast.

As such, the Fossil Forest “supplies data on an historical atmosphere during which late Jurassic dinosaurs lived,” West wrote.