Utoo Radio with Other News Sources - August 30, 2024 - A network of trees believed to be about 386 million years old was discovered in Cairo, USA, at the bottom of a sandstone quarry.

The forest, which is believed to have once stretched about 400 kilometers, is older than the Amazon rainforest, India's jungles, and the remote forests of southeast Asia.

Scientists from Binghamton University, New York State Museum, and Cardiff University mapped about 3,000 square meters of the forest in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in the Hudson Valley in 2019.

The forest contains early plants called cladoxylopsids, Achaeopteris trees, and a single example of a third type of tree, possibly a lycopod.

All these trees reproduced using spores rather than seeds.

The findings have allowed scientists to understand how trees began to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the specifics of which plants, habitats, and types of ecology were driving global change.