World’s oldest forest found in New York

The world’s oldest forest is in New York City’s backyard.

The site, located in Cairo, New York, features root impressions that are 385 million years old, according to Binghamton University. The site sits just east of the famous Gilboa fossil forest in Schoharie County, which was originally hailed as the world’s oldest forest in the 1920s.

The forest dates back to the Middle Devonian period, according to Binghamton, a time in which modern day New York was located in the southern hemisphere of the world and had a semi-arid climate; most of the land was barren. Additionally, the atmosphere also had three to five times the level of carbon dioxide.

Although interpretations of forests during this period resemble something of a rainforest, the ancient forest of Cairo rested along an abandoned river-channel and low spot that filled seasonally with water, according to Binghamton University. It had a variety of trees, from the prehistoric palm tree-like family of Eospermatopteris, to the conifer-like family of Archaeopteris, to potentially even a lycopsid tree, which is related to today’s club moss.

According to the publication Science, when trees evolved from these roots, they pulled carbon dioxide from the air and locked it away, drastically shifting the planet’s climate, eventually developing into the atmosphere we know today.

The site at Cairo has been shielded from the public to protect it from fossil hunters, according to Binghamton.