New discoveries and revelations happen daily about everything, from our past to our future, that are astonishing and profound, just like this one made recently.
A prehistoric forest that dates back 298 MILLION years has been disocovered INTACT below a coal mine in China after being perfectly preserved under volcanic ash this whole time. Wow, just wow!
The forest is so perfectly preserved that researchers can literally recreate the forest exactly as it was almost 300 million years ago.
Their findings are so precise they have created images of what it would have actually looked like to our eyes, how fantastic!
Gizmodo writes:
American and Chinese scientists are flabbergasted after discovering a giant 298-million-year-old forest buried intact under a coal mine near Wuda, in Inner Mongolia, China.
They are calling it the Pompeii of the Permian period because, like the ancient Roman city, it was covered and preserved by volcanic ash.
Like Pompeii, this swamp forest is so perfectly maintained that scientists know where every plant originally was. This has allowed them to map it and to create the images above. This extraordinary finding “is like Pompeii”, according to University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn, who characterized it as “a time capsule.”
“It’s marvelously preserved. We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That’s really exciting.”
They are in fact finding entire trees and plants exactly as they were at the time of the volcanic eruption, just like archeologists in Pompeii found humans, animals and buildings at the base of Mount Vesuvius, near Naples, in the Italian region of Campania. Except Pompeei was buried in AD 79 and this forest was covered in ash 298 million years ago, during the Permian period.
Read more at gizmodo.com