Washington, Apr 25 : An international team of researchers from the US and the UK claim to have unearthed the fossilized remains of Earth’s first rainforest.

More than 300 years old, the forest comprises of a bizarre mixture of extinct plants, abundant club mosses, more than 40 metres high towering over a sub-canopy of tree ferns, intermixed with shrubs and tree-sized horsetails.

The fossilized forest was preserved following a major earthquake 300 million years ago.

According to Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from the University of Bristol, UK, who discovered the forest along with US colleagues in the underground workings of a coalmine, in Illinois, USA, the quake caused the whole region to drop below sea level whereupon the forest became buried in mud, preserving it forever.

“It was an amazing experience. We drove down the mine in an armoured vehicle, until we were a hundred metres below the surface. The fossil forest was rooted on top of the coal seam, so where the coal had been mined away the fossilized forest was visible in the ceiling of the mine,” said Dr. Lang.

“We walked for miles and miles along pitch-black passages with the fossil forest just above our heads. We were able to make a map of the forest by the light of our miner’s lamps,” he said.

The fossil forest is the largest ever found. It covers over 10,000 hectares, an area 10 km by 10 km, as large as the city of Bristol in the UK.

Dr. Lang said the fossils also preserve a unique snapshot of what tropical rainforests were like 300 million year ago.

“As there is nothing like it around today, before our work we knew very little about the ecological preferences and community structure of these ancient plants. This spectacular discovery allows us to track how the species make-up of the forest changed across the landscape, and how that species make-up is effected by subtle differences in the local environment,” said Dr. Lang.

The findings appear online in the current issue of the journal Geology. (ANI)