Butlin’s holiday camp in Minehead is an area visited by many guests in Somerset who thoroughly enjoy the fairground entertainment and swimming pool complexes. The surrounding countryside, however, contains the fossilized remains of the world’s oldest forest. A new study published this week in the journal of the Geological Society reveals that the town of Minehead lies next to the fossilized 390 million years old remains of the world’s oldest known forest.
Before this remarkable discovery, the oldest known forest was a 386 million years old forest in New York State. This new forest, found in sandstone cliffs near Minehead’s famous Butlin’s holiday camp and stretching as far as the neighboring county of Devon, consists of fossilized Calamophyton trees that scientists say at first glance resemble palm trees. But they were much less complex and were early examples of the tree species we are more familiar with today.
The differences between these ancient trees and modern ones is that Calamophyton trees had thin, hollow trunks instead of the massive trunks of modern trees. Even stranger, Calamophyton’s branches were covered with hundreds of thin twig-like structures instead of leaves. As these relatively short trees (normally between two and four meters tall) grew, they shed their lower branches, which shed a lot of vegetation on the ground.
Dr. Christopher Berry, Lecturer in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Cardiff University, who identified the fossils, said: “These Calamophyton trees are the oldest fossil trees ever found in Britain and represent a part of our vegetation history that is still missing.”
The discovered forest dates back to the Devonian Period, between 419 and 358 million years ago, when life began to leave the water and spread on land. The reason why the period is named after the county of Devon is because of the marine rocks that symbolize the period and were discovered off the Devon coastline.
The part of the coastline where the forest was discovered is known as the Hangman Sandstone Formation, and interestingly, during the Devonian Period, this area was not connected to the rest of the UK, but to parts of Belgium and Germany, which belonged to similar Devonian periods. It was then shifted along a major geological fault during the Carboniferous period, during crustal compression and faulting during the collision of Africa with Europe.
The first author of the study, Prof. Neil Davies from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, said: “The Devonian period fundamentally changed life on Earth. It also changed how water and soil interacted with each other, as trees and other plants helped stabilize sediments through their root systems. But little is known about the earliest forests. The evidence contained in these fossils preserves an important stage in Earth’s development, when rivers began to function in a completely different way than they had before, becoming the great erosive force they are today.”
Cover Photo: Martin Fowler/ Geographical