Scientists revealed that Earth's oldest known tree, Wattieza, which lived during the Middle Devonian period and preceded dinosaurs by 140 million years, was nearly 30 feet tall and looked like a modern palm.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.“Our reconstruction shows them to be a lot longer and much more treelike than any of the reconstructions before,” Stein told LiveScience. “I don’t think any of us dared think of them being quite that big.”
The tree belonged to a group of early fern-like plants called Wattieza. Unlike flowering plants, which use seeds to reproduce, Wattieza used spores, the reproductive method of choice for algae, ferns and fungi.
