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Lepidodendron species were comparable in size to modern trees. The plants had tapering trunks as wide as 2 m (6.6 ft) at their base that rose to about 40 m (130 ft) [ 2 ] and even 50 m (160 ft), [ 1 ] arising from an underground system of horizontally spreading branches that were covered with many rootlets.
Lepidodendrales (from the Greek for "scale tree") or arborescent lycophytes are an extinct order of primitive, vascular, heterosporous, arborescent (tree-like) plants belonging to Lycopodiopsida. Members of Lepidodendrales are the best understood of the fossil lycopsids due to the vast diversity of Lepidodendrales specimens and the diversity in ...
The strata were deposited approximately 325 million years ago when the tree-like plants were still alive, and the strata are now tilted and cut by many faults and slant downwards to the northeast. The quarry in which the fossils were found is an igneous dolerite sill that was intruded into the sediments and two of the trunks during the Early ...
During the Carboniferous, tree-like plants (such as Lepidodendron, Sigillaria, and other extinct genera of the order Lepidodendrales) formed huge forests that dominated the landscape. Unlike modern trees, leaves grew out of the entire surface of the trunk and branches, but fell off as the plant grew, leaving only a small cluster of leaves at ...
However, the composition of the forests changed from a lepidodendron-dominated forest to one of predominantly tree ferns and seed ferns. The Carboniferous rainforest collapse ( CRC ) was a minor extinction event that occurred around 305 million years ago in the Carboniferous period. [ 1 ]
Other species specialized in re-settling land which had been briefly deforested by flooding: Synchysidendron and Lepidodendron in mineral-soil areas and Lepidophloios in peat areas. Cordaites may have favored drier areas of the swamp. In the later part of this period tree ferns tended to take over from lycopsid trees.
Associated fossil wood suggests that this specimen died inside a Lepidodendron tree trunk. [1] In 1987, Jennifer A. Clack suggested that a different embolomere, Eogyrinus attheyi from Newsham, Northumberland, belonged to the same genus as Pholiderpeton. She subsumed the genus Eogyrinus into Pholiderpeton and created the new combination P ...
The type species Leptophloeum rhombicum was initially perceived as a Lepidodendron-like arborescent lycopsid with isodichotomous branching systems and stigmarian rhizomorphs. [2] Later in 2005, a new reconstruction based on anatomically preserved material was proposed but this lacked information on the rooting system.