On the Ground: A walk in the oldest forest on Earth

When scientists Neil Davies and Will McMahon stopped for lunch under the cliffs of west Somerset, they found something very unexpected. Their discovery supports a new paradigm about the world's oldest engineers, and may even change your mind about deep time.

In this episode of On the Ground, host Laura Cole travels to the rugged coastline of South West England to walk the site of a groundbreaking geological revelation: the world’s oldest fossilised forest. She's joined by Neil Davies and Will McMahon, the researchers who quite literally stumbled upon history while sitting down for a sandwich.

Dating back an incredible 390 million years to the Devonian Period, this ancient ecosystem is four million years older than the previous record-holder in New York State. But this isn't just a story about old rocks. These strange fossils, known as Calamophyton, were Earth’s very first environmental engineers. Neil and Will explain how these primitive trees permanently altered how water and land interact, shaping the world's river systems and accelerating the expansion of life on land.  

Read the research: Earth’s earliest forest: fossilized trees and vegetation-induced sedimentary structures, co-authored by Neil Davies, Will McMahon, and Christopher Berry.

See what ancient Calamophyton looked like.

Follow host Laura Cole on LinkedIn.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:00

This one location was an asked before truly. But yeah, it was a good, a good spot.

SPEAKER_03 0:06

Neil Davis is a sedimentary geologist at the University of Cambridge. He goes all over the world looking for special geological layers. And he's been doing it for more than 20 years. Although he made headlines for finding the world's largest ever millipede in 2018, this thing was huge. It was as big as a car and 320 million years old. He's keen to tell me it's not a treasure. His interest is in a peculiar time in Earth's history where there begins a really visible change in the rock record.

SPEAKER_06 0:37

If you look at geological timing for the first 90% of Earth history, there are no planets. And we also know that if they're not there for the first 90% of Earth history, then that means the planet's a very different place. And all the evidence that you see in the rock record tells you that.

SPEAKER_03 0:54

That transition period from that 90% into that 10% is really old. It's about 350 to 500 million years ago. To go back that far, you'd have to go back to the age of Brachiosaurus, the long necks, and then more than double that amount of time. In fact, the first dinosaurs wouldn't appear for another at least 100 million years. Something had to happen first. The plants had to green the continents. Because he's interested in the kind of minerals that formed around those first plants and the way that rivers laid down mud rocks, it doesn't usually mean he's going to see any fossils. Then came the field trip to North Devon and Somerset in 2021. With research colleague Will McMahon, Neil went to a special layer of rocks called the Hangman's Sandstone in the cliffs on the coast. They negotiated with tide times and some of the highest cliffs in England, and even wrangled a fisherman's boat for access to some of these areas. But it was still in touch along the well-known part of the rock face that they spotted what looked like recent bike tide tracks in the mud. It's just that the surface hadn't been mud for 390 million years. What they found next would capture the ultimate watershed, a window into an ancient world at a point where it was just becoming recognizable. Their discovery supports a new paradigm about the world's oldest engineers and might even change your mind about deep time. This is on the ground by Geographical Vaccine. He sent the photos of the tie track markings to Christopher Berry, a paleobotanist at Cardiff University. Chris has studied paleobotany for 35 years. As a paleontologist might reel off the names of dinosaurs, Chris reels off the names of ancient trees, Aospermatopteris, a woodless tree which spread via spores. It could grow up to 8 metres. Archaeopteris, the first tree to develop bark and leaves. He made a landmark discovery in the field when he proved that a plant previously recognised as an individual type, Deusbergia, was actually the fallen branches of a tree called Calimophyton. So, we've come to Minehead on the west coast of Somerset. It's an area probably best known for a different national treasure, Portland Holiday Park. Looking eastwards, you can see the White Pavilion. Looking north across the slate covered seven estuary, you can actually see South Wales from here. When he received the emails with the curious photos, he was surprised at the location.

SPEAKER_05 3:44

I was really excited because as as you know, if you look in the opposite direction, you can see where I live in South Wales. And I've literally gone round the world looking for these things, and uh that Neil should find it. So close. Although it's frustratingly, takes a frustrating time to get to it in Cardiff. It is uh it is remarkably close.

SPEAKER_03 4:08

Walking westwards along the beach, rising on our left is a 30-metre high cliff which holds a part of that sandstone formation. That noise is our feet on the shingle, which is about ostrich ankle size rocks, perfect trap and angle. Today is a luscious green coastline on top with some of that telltale red colour in the cliff base. At the bottom of this, there's an outcrop of sediment that was deposited by water in layers around 390 million years ago. It's been then exposed by the sea's handiwork. I asked Neil what this exact area would have looked like 390 million years ago.

SPEAKER_06 4:42

So effectively a relatively semi-arid dryland river that's coming out of the mountains, and as it comes out of the mountains, uh the flow stops being as channelised as it was. So it's spreading out from the mountains to the open basin floor, but it fans out because the energy is dissipating radially. And as it fans out, it creates a fan-like shape of sediment, which is not dissimilar to what would happen if you took a bag of sugar and stuffed a pencil into the side of it and watched it spill out.

SPEAKER_03 5:19

Small plants may have been round for a bit already, so there may have already been some clays and mud holding things in place. But for the most part, it's a much more transient and erratic river environment.

SPEAKER_05 5:31

Something amazing is happening because within a few million years we've got really interesting, large, diverse plants. But we don't really understand what happened during this critical interval.

SPEAKER_03 5:46

As scientists, the two think quite differently about the shapes that the environment are going to throw onto the rock record. As a paleobotanist, Chris talks about having built up over the years a sort of a search image repository in his mind, that he's almost automatically mapping onto curls and shades and rocks on the floor. Neil, on the other hand, thinks through the sediment record.

SPEAKER_06 6:07

Paleobotanists think of fossil plants as the remains of living organisms, and we tend to think of them as shapes with different properties as to how that might affect the physical fluid properties on the earth. So the roots act to bind things, the trunks and stems act to disrupt flow as it moves through. Even the branches and leaves, if they're present, they can act again to baffle fluids at a higher level. So when I say body plan, I mean the the the shape of the tree and all the different components of these plants, these organisms are appearing for the first time.

SPEAKER_03 6:49

You can hear it steadily on most of these recordings. In a way, it's useful. We can imagine that that's the sound of the river as it's flowing out towards its own ancient sea. It's a little bit confusing, but that ancient sea is probably more in the direction we're facing it, towards the cliff. Today, if you laid a hologram of that river over the scene, you'd probably see it flowing inland and under it.

SPEAKER_05 7:13

And we need to be right at the bottom of the um anticline. As you can see, it's really quite um steep and things do fall off it occasionally.

SPEAKER_03 7:29

When Chris rocked up here with Neil's coordinates in hand, he looked up and was a bit worried about the danger of rockfalls. He doesn't recommend that people go looking for these signs.

SPEAKER_05 7:39

So yeah, we've we climb over these boulders. We're just about to reach this big platform with the fossils on. Here we are. Here, this is one of them. You have to imagine this upright covered in these these very pretty branches.

SPEAKER_03 7:56

It's the width of a wrist but stretches for about two metres. It's a tree trunk, and it's lying flat across the ground, as if it's fallen over and maybe been washed downstream. There's others strewn here. It looks a bit like something you would see around a delta that was forested. Chris Berry is one of those amazing teachers, and he's brought along a picture of what it looks like, which I'll put up with the episode here. He's got this painting, and at first glance it looks something like a palm. You've got this long, thin trunk which seems to taper at either end outwards. It reminds me a bit of one of those finger traps.

SPEAKER_05 8:36

And with lots of little nubbins or branch bases arranged on the e on the front and either side of them, and then at the top a crown of these very special branches which look a little bit like hands.

SPEAKER_03 8:48

The idea is that the branches would have dropped as calamophyton grew, leaving these little nubbins running up the length of the tree. If it was a bike print, the tread coming off the line at little intervals.

SPEAKER_05 8:59

So it is the oldest thing that we think of as being a tree, a vascular part with a water conducting system growing upright. Growing upright in a sort of unconstrained way. It could just grow up until it mechanically couldn't grow any higher, really, which is probably about three or four metres at that type.

SPEAKER_03 9:23

Calamophyton didn't have leaves or butt. Those would be developed by other tree species. But it's the oldest tree prototype, and they got to be really big. Excavations that Chris was part of in New York State unveiled their descendants some four million years later and sees them eight metres tall.

SPEAKER_05 9:41

They're not as good as when I first saw them, and these things always decay, so I'm really happy that I have a model of this, you know, when it was in its best state.

SPEAKER_02 9:52

That's kind of incredible that in what is that, two years it can change so quickly.

SPEAKER_05 9:57

It's just it's just geology. I mean, where does sediment come from? Rocks regularly falling back. The erosion is obviously a curse, but it's also the thing which it supposes the fossils in the first place. So this is we think on the order of about 392-393 million years old, which is yeah, for most people that's that's that is difficult to uh imagine. But um if you go back another 10 million years before that, then plants were much smaller again. So it is a significant moment in the evolution of vegetation, really, to start seeing these real trees growing and affecting the sediment around them and the behaviour of the landscape surface.

SPEAKER_03 10:53

Although scientists know that this big greening transition happened, it can be hard to find evidence that truly captures the processes as they were beginning to take place. An important part of the story is actually where we were on the globe. 390 million years ago, this part of the UK and northern Europe was actually nearer the equator. But even more locally, what is now this Devon and Cornwall Peninsula coming out of the west of England was a little bit elsewhere. So geologists believe that this area was a lowland near a coastline to an ancient sea. Facing that ocean, we've got to imagine Belgium to our left and Germany a little bit beyond. There's mountain building in what is now Scotland behind us, which caused uplift in Wales and southwest England. But these lowlands are less dramatic unless you count the layers and layers of red sediment coming off them.

SPEAKER_06 11:56

The general idea is that basically that this is a period of uplift. We're only seeing the sediments where there's a base and where there's a kind of depression in the lithosphere, and that's that arises because of the mountain building episodes that are happening at the time. So as the mountains build up, the flexure in front of them creates hollows where sediment can accumulate and get preserved that was away from what were then highlands in England and Wales proper. And that is the time and area where you've got a base of development and the capability of storing sediment long term so that you can see it at the present day.

SPEAKER_03 12:29

If the movement of water and rock wasn't enough to deal with, there was now something brand new in town, and it was beginning to make fundamental changes to both. The small plants might have already been doing some of that legwork. They're providing what Neil calls a superhighway between the air and the lithosphere. They can affect the chemistry of the rock to produce clays. The world's first greening was happening. I wanted to ask a biogeomorphologist to explain this revolution and where the newcomers like Calamophyton fit in. A biogeomorphologist is an expert on how living things, the biopart, influences the shape of rivers and other landforms. Dove Corinblyt looks at both ancient landforms as well as the ecosystems we have today. What do scientists mean when they say the Devonian plant explosion?

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Over thousands and millions of years we can see occurring new traits and new strategies of plants that will be, for example, adapted to an environment that is less subjected to the physical disturbance. And that's what occurred and happened during the Devonian. And this is the point that is widely studied by the geologist and the paleontologist related to the huge transition during Silurian, Devonian, when appeared the first riparian forests.

SPEAKER_03 13:57

So you're saying it's kind of like it's under new management?

SPEAKER_00 14:00

It is.

SPEAKER_03 14:45

This array, he explains, would have had different strata for plants, the ground layer, shrubs, an understory, then a canopy. These can blend the sediment in different places along the river corridor, right next to the water on river bars and the banks and the floodplains. It made a greening feedback loop which slowed everything down and held it in place differently, or in a way that wouldn't have worked previously. The planet hadn't seen anything like it before, and it wouldn't be the same again afterwards.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

And it will last until today. And this was the moment where we took place for the first time the evolution of the years.

SPEAKER_05 15:24

So where we are is um I guess about a kilometre west of Fall of Weir, and there's a big slab of rock angled down to the beach here. But it's this surface, which is so interesting.

SPEAKER_03 15:41

The slab's done some of Neil's interpretive work for us. What was once a flat riverside is now a steep angle tilted up and away from us. What it becomes is an enormous display of an ancient riverbank, and we're looking downstream, probably. The river would have likely been 15 metres across and about 75 centimetres deep. On the old bank are some dinner plate-sized holes.

SPEAKER_05 16:02

And so the interpretation of these holes is that they're the bases of the little trees that existed at that time, most likely Calamophyton. And at some point they've been knocked over and they've disturbed the tops of the ripple crests.

SPEAKER_03 16:18

He points towards a scoured hole in the rock face and a long impression of a fallen tree beside it. There's six or seven other big dips with these horseshoe scours of sediment fawning around them.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

Yeah. And so the the long impression. Yes. Yes. The trunk. Yes. Yes. Yes. Does anyone hear it? Does anyone hear it?

SPEAKER_05 16:48

That's the earliest evidence of standing little trees that we have in the fossil record as an entirety, I think. Which makes it very exciting. Because we've seen these trees so much in Belgium and Germany, but we've never seen the context in which they were actually growing. They've always been ripped up and transported somewhere else. And here we have evidence of them actually on their riverbank 393 or so million years ago.

SPEAKER_03 17:26

Chris describes the kind of scene we might have been looking at then.

SPEAKER_05 17:29

With a few young ones, a few older ones, and the ground absolutely covered beneath it with these hundreds and hundreds of little branches which would have impacted the sedimentation. And you're asking, you know, where's carbon and sown in the soil coming from? Well, that's where it's coming from. Yes. Yeah, there's this all sorts of um detritivorous insects and um millipedes and things going through that.

SPEAKER_03 18:02

From a sedimentary point of view, Chris tells me that one of the main reasons why it's even still here is because the trees were there.

SPEAKER_06 18:08

The reason the channel is where it is, the reason it maintained its scour is because those trees were keeping that riverbank in place. If if that sediment had been laid down just 10 million years earlier and those trees weren't there, then that riverbank would have been very much more mobile. It would have flitted back and forth across the landscape and it wouldn't have been held in place. But the reason it was held in place at the time was the plants, and then there are geological forces that have held it in place for another 380 million years. But the the plants gave it the opportunity to be locked in in the first instance.

SPEAKER_05 18:43

Yeah, that's quite amazing to see that.

SPEAKER_03 18:48

We head over to the second surface. It's thought that these substrates became vertical when Gondwana land, what's now Africa, and pretty much all of the southern continents, crunched into the northern continents to create Pangaea, and it crumpled everything in between, creating some of the Appalachians, the massifs in France, the mountains of western Spain and Portugal, and it sort of raised this bit upright.

SPEAKER_05 19:10

But there's lots of little sort of hexagonal um features which are quite unlike anything that we've ever seen.

SPEAKER_03 19:22

The surface is pockmarked with all these ping-pong ball-sized little hexagons.

SPEAKER_05 19:27

And the most logical explanation is that these are are somehow little trees which have been trees, small plants, which have been growing there and which have been rotted away and then cast with sand. And they're very close together. And that's exactly the shape that we'd expect the bottom of a little calamophyton tree to look like when it was when it was only about an inch in diameter and just growing. So it's possible that this is a re-vegetated surface with lots of small plants, some of which will grow and be successful. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 20:04

Because it's not possible for them to see any roots or any other plant matter, it's hard for Chris to be as confident about this as the other big substrate.

SPEAKER_05 20:25

And clearly because they've all been buried and none of them are bigger than an inch across, um, they didn't make it, standing. I'd love to be able to take one home and grow it on my windowsill.

SPEAKER_03 20:37

And so a hypothetical is that some sediment came one day and just like a flood came in and just covered it.

SPEAKER_05 20:46

Well, you can see there's a the the bed which is on top of it is maybe 30 centimetres thick. That much sand on tiny little trees is gonna be quite damaging, I think.

SPEAKER_03 20:59

Because it's the earliest evidence of a forest on earth, it's necessarily the first snapshot of a forest's impact on water and sediment. I didn't actually expect it to look so alive. There's other layers that the two of them have seen that have rain splatter on them, like it's just rained. Chris knew the feeling. He's been part of grand excavations for an entire forest floor in New York State.

SPEAKER_05 21:21

But yeah, the best thing was going to this quarry in upstate New York, where you can see the bases where they were growing so clearly. Um seeing that for the first time, you know, just sitting quietly in the middle of them. Imagining these trees growing from these bases. I mean that's people looked at fossils ranges, but actually connecting all the bits together and imagining a real ecosystem growing around you that was there, and you could imagine that nobody else would really be able to do that.

SPEAKER_03 21:58

How do you feel? Seeing these things and closing that gap of 390 million years. Do you not think that they're really lucky fossils to be found? All the things that had to come together and work in order for you to discover them, and they're finally seen for what they are.

SPEAKER_06 22:15

Yeah, well, it's enjoyable.

SPEAKER_03 22:18

At first, I was a bit taken aback by his matter-of-factness. They explain that these time machines are more of a slow burn for sedimentologists.

SPEAKER_06 22:24

People have often thought in intuitively that that seems like a very rare idea that you could, you know, you go to the beach and your footprint on the beach might be there for several days. But the reality is it happens. So there's no way that's not the case in the timescales we're looking at. It's rivers depositing patches, uh, lakes depositing patches, and over geological time, those patches shift where they are. So when they do shift, there's a very good chance you're taken out of the energy regime of moving water that might say just reset everything after every day. And there's just one day where it doesn't happen again at that location, and then on top of that, you need the next thing to happen at that location to be sufficiently weak in its capacity to move sediment that it can cast that layer in sediment, but not remove that sediment. Something happens and then sometimes nothing happens afterwards. And especially on a geological timescale, when you're when you're setting the kind of the temporal arena in which these things are happening to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, then yeah, sometimes stuff slips through the net. You see these things in preserved as they were on the day they were deposited. And it's like the kind of dirt under the fingernails of the of geological time.

SPEAKER_03 23:46

In a sense, he was saying we're more the lucky ones to be able to find them, if you know what you're looking at.

SPEAKER_06 23:52

But that's why it pays dividends to really spend time traipsing out these successions, looking through every single layer of sediment.

SPEAKER_03 24:06

As plants are a relatively recent addition to Earth's history, fully appreciating their role is a recent addition to human history, at least in the scientific fields.

SPEAKER_00 24:15

Biogomorphology is um is a discipline that is um is young, is a young discipline.

SPEAKER_03 24:22

According to Dov, this was an understanding that had its roots back in Darwinian thinking, but really only picked up steam in the 70s and then exploded in the 2000s. To get an understanding of it, I had to find the woman who really developed this concept, Angela Gurnell.

SPEAKER_04 24:42

So my name's Angela Gurnell. I've been working on various scientific topics to do with rivers for over 50 years now.

SPEAKER_03 24:52

She's retired now, but her work launched our most recent understandings of how trees engineer their river environment.

SPEAKER_04 24:58

In the last 40 of those years, I've been particularly interested in how rivers work with vegetation in order to create the natural landscapes that we see if we leave the rivers alone and let them get on with it.

SPEAKER_03 25:17

Until about the middle of the last century, scientists saw rivers mainly via the physics of water and rock.

SPEAKER_04 25:23

So it was all about flow and flow energy and sediment.

SPEAKER_03 25:28

Well, it began to be understood that rivers could have different characteristics like alluvial bars or higher banks.

SPEAKER_04 25:34

But the sort of underlying belief, if you like, was that the vegetation was there simply because the river processes were allowing it. In other words, the river processes at those points were gentle enough that they weren't just ripping out the vegetation.

SPEAKER_03 25:53

So it started with studies on dead wood in the 1970s and the way that it created different opportunities for other plants. And then it morphed into a gradual understanding of how plants active, not passive.

SPEAKER_04 26:03

I think once you get to the year 2000, then that was the beginning of really, really serious consideration of plants as river engineers.

SPEAKER_03 26:15

It was a specific river that swung the argument for Angela, the Taliamento in Italy, a fairly wild, unmanaged river that pours out the Alps. Her interest was certain types of plants, not all plants, the bioengineers. Similar to how we know that beavers can start to manipulate their environment, she was interested in white willow and black poplar and what they could do to an unmanaged river. To convince anyone, she just says you have to see it. And then you can't unsee it.

SPEAKER_04 26:42

But you've only got to walk across this sort of vast area of gravel bars and main channels, side channels of various sizes, and see the islands between those channels. And not only see those islands, but you can see little tiny islands, what we called pioneer islands, which were formed of trees that had been uprooted from somewhere, have been dumped on the gravel bar and had immediately started sending out roots and shoots and holding the gravel together and trapping fine sediments which were being washed down the river, which otherwise wouldn't be retained. They just wash over the gravel bars.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

If you go on the internet and you and you you you take the keyword back poplar garden, gardening, how can I take out the black poplar and put in my garden? You can see that it is impossible because it provides strong roots that will remain in the soil and that will form new clones.

SPEAKER_04 27:44

The only reason the silt and sand was there was because the trees were able to trap it, hold it together with their root systems, and then grow up through it, send up shoots, which again send out more roots until you could build up islands that stood per out maybe two metres above the top of the gravel bowls. So there's no reason to have any silver there if there wasn't something to hold it in place. What was holding it in place? The trees were holding it in place.

SPEAKER_03 28:14

Quite amazing. Did other scientists come around fairly quickly to this idea?

SPEAKER_04 28:20

I don't think scientists were averse to this at all. They just hadn't thought about it, you know. It didn't seem logical that plants could be important. And then you start looking at rivers in different areas and it becomes obvious actually they are.

SPEAKER_03 28:37

How does it feel now knowing that the paradigm is changed or is changing?

SPEAKER_04 28:42

It's like all things in science, isn't it? Somebody's just got to say it in the first place. And then you either show that what they're saying is correct, and you have a new sort of paradigm, if you like, or you show that it's incorrect and everybody forgets that. Fortunately, for me in this case, and my colleagues, what we're saying proved to be correct in many circumstances, anyway. Once you've got this in your head, you can walk along rivers in the English lowlands, and you pursue the effect of plants everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 29:26

What I really wanted to know was how she felt seeing 390 million-year-old support for her ideas. Her biogeomorphology work was cited in the fossil forest paper. These trees, the calamophyton, they likely hadn't reached that stage of bioengineering. They were in the pioneering stage. But 390 million years ago, they seemingly were showing off some of those first traits that she observed in the 2000s.

SPEAKER_04 29:49

Oh, that's great. You know, this fundamental finding of Neil Davis and his colleagues, which was that if you go back far enough in the Earth's history and you look for evidence of rivers in the sedimentary deposits, what you're seeing is braided rivers basically. And then all of a sudden it would appear. Things that look must have looked very like trees appeared across the landscape, and then suddenly you started to get single-thread, sinuous or not necessarily single thread, there might be more wandering rivers where you have maybe two threads or three threads, but not lots of threads. Much more clearly defined channels than occurred before. And you know that's really amazing and exciting, isn't it? It's still going on now.

SPEAKER_03 30:56

To me it seems like a double-edged study. Angela and Dobbs work on modern ecosystems and Neil and Chris's work are either side of the rock record. A 390 million year sandwich. Neil told me that sedimentary geology also used to be kind of the preserve of physical processes.

SPEAKER_06 31:14

But we now know that it's not just an artifact of physics, it's physics interacting with chemistry and it's interacting with biology. And it means that lots of the work that the places where people have looked before, they haven't been looked at with this kind of modern view that there's a whole host of surface processes that act together beyond just the kind of the fluid flow itself.

SPEAKER_03 31:36

To him, plants have been and are pulling the strings. But like most things in environmental interactions, it can't be total. On the middle scale, tectonics and nearby climate dictate where a river is. But either side of that, on the small local scale, plants are actively transforming land, and on a larger scale, plants are making fundamental step changes in the rock record.

SPEAKER_06 31:58

And then you've got to think that actually a river today is flowing a path that's been taken by 380 million years of its ancestors or more. And those rivers will have left behind muddy sediment and different types of sedimentary rock types. So they're sourced from that, that's where their sediment's coming from. It's pretty inescapable that are not just important at the present day, but the the actions they've had in deep time are also influencing to some extent the modern rivers.

SPEAKER_03 32:33

It actually makes it difficult to find a true analogue unvegetated river on Earth.

SPEAKER_06 32:37

They're not only partially vegetated at the present day, they were fully vegetated within living memory for the river itself, and they're inheriting a landscape that was veget has been vegetated for the best part of 400 million years.

SPEAKER_03 32:52

With all this legacy, surely the earliest fossil forests get some kind of a cave painting status. I was still surprised at how relaxed Neil and Chris were about this process and that these fossils were disappearing by the day. Then I remembered Neil's comment about the dirt under the fingernails of geological time. And it struck me that maybe the idea wasn't to be excited by an individual find any less, but be in awe of deep time more. Chris reminded me that there are always more to find under the surface.

SPEAKER_05 33:30

You know, if you go into under the grass and under the rocks here, there'll be more of these. It's the the right layer and things come and go.

SPEAKER_03 33:38

And if there is any luck in hunting for old forests, where it seems to lie is in pattern seeking over treasure hunting, which is a testament to observational science, really.

SPEAKER_06 33:48

If anything, it just says that people need to go out and look at more rocks, because there's more opportunity in Middle Demonian rocks to find fossils where maybe people haven't looked before.

SPEAKER_03 34:13

This episode was produced by myself, Laura Cole, and edited by Graham Gorley and Briney Cossum, with music by The Clean Shots. If you like what you've been hearing, please give us a rating on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. We're brand new and it all helps.