“It never disappoints … These new finds are stunning. “The petrified forest is the first stop on our fieldtrip,” said Chronis Tzedakis, a professor of physical geography at University College London, who has been running field classes on the Aegean isle for the past decade. In more recent times, Lesbos has been better known for the thousands of refugees who have landed on its shores but the island’s unusually diverse landscape and vegetation also draws scientists interested in its geological past. They might be an indication of what is coming if we don’t get our act together in tackling the climate change emergency.” “Finds like these are a window into a particular past, a greenhouse, hothouse world, that existed back then. “It’s a world-class place to look at the type of environment that existed 20m years ago,” he told the Guardian. The climate emergency has highlighted the need to understand ecosystems in a hotter future if global temperatures are not reduced and, as such, Lesbos’s petrified forest offers an invaluable window into the past, said Prof Iain Stewart, who directs the Sustainable Earth Institute at the University of Plymouth. Petrified tree trunks at the excavation site. “That it was buried by sediments expelled during a destructive volcanic eruption, and then found in situ, makes it even more unusual.” In the history of paleontology, worldwide, it’s unique,” said the Portuguese palaeontologist Artur Abreu Sá. “We have a case of extraordinary fossilisation in which a tree was preserved with its various parts intact. Geologists around the world have described the find as a breakthrough. “It will now form part of the open-air museum we intend to create.” The road work stopped, we starting excavating and quite quickly realised we had chanced upon an incredible find,” said Zouros. “Constructors were about to asphalt that part of the highway when one of our technicians noticed a tiny branch. The discovery of an entire tree lying on a bed of leaves was not only unprecedented but down to pure luck. “The first forests that we know of were subtropical, a far cry from the Mediterranean vegetation on Lesbos today.”Įxcavations by his 35-strong team along a 20km highway connecting Sigri with Kalloni, the region’s biggest town, since 2013 have yielded more than 15 significant fossil sites but the earlier finds have paled next to the most recent. “The more we discover the more we understand past ecosystems,” he said. Zouros, who heads the Museum of Natural History in Sigri, has spent decades studying the various forests that existed in the area at the time. A fossilised tree trunk in the petrified forest of Lesbos.
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