Earth's oldest known tree stood nearly 30 feet tall and looked like a modern palm, a new reconstruction shows.Workers uncovered hundreds of upright stumps of the 385 million-year-old tree more than a century ago, after a flash flood in Gilboa, New York uncovered them, but little else was known about the tree’s appearance.
Then, in 2004, scientists unearthed a 400-pound fossilized top — or crown — of the same genus a few miles away. The following summer, the same team discovered fragments of a 28-foot trunk. Piecing together stump, trunk and crown now reveals what the full tree looked like for the first time.
“These were very big trees,” said study team member William Stein, a paleobotanist at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Read More
