The Illinois rainforest

From NewScientist.com:

Researchers have uncovered a 300-million-year–old-fossilised rainforest, buried deep below ground in a coal mine in Illinois, US. It is by far the largest such forest ever found and provides an unprecedented look at the ecology of one of the world's earliest tropical forests.

There are club mosses (of the class Lycopodiopsida, they survive today; but now they're tiny) that grew a meter thick and more than forty meters high.

We're really spinning the dials on the Wayback machine, here, folks. We're talking close relatives of ferns that are 130 feet tall, from about fifty million years before the age of the dinosaurs.

This is in Vermilion County, Illinois. I thought that all the coal mining in Illinois was way, way, south; but this is to the east of Champaign near the border with Indiana. 300 million years ago (we were part of Pangea at the time), presumably a super-sized earthquake led the forest to be submerged, and then be buried in mud and sediment.

The fossilised forest lay preserved on top of a layer of coal that, when removed by miners, left the ancient forest visible on the mine ceiling.