The weight of the trees was so great that the ones on the bottom got squished and became coal. That’s where coal is from. Bonus fact: the whole time this was happening, sharks were hunting in the oceans. Sharks are older than trees and fungus!
Fungi in general are about twice as old as sharks. Roughly a billion years vs ~450 million years.
The point is there just weren’t any which had bacteria to decompose trees, as no bacteria had evolved the ability yet. Until there were. Took millions of years though.
Fun fact, now we have mushrooms which can deal with plastic.
Pestalotiopsis microspora is a type of endophytic fungus discovered in the Amazon rainforest in 2011 which contains bacteria that can biodegrade and break down synthetic plastic polymers.
that’s what i was thinkin… surely single-cell eukaryote (fungi) is earlier than complex eukaryote (shark)?
you’d think so, but sharks were in fact the first lifeform to be summoned from the astral planes, everything else evolved from a single shark cell that had the right mutations to survive (all sharks simply died within minutes until plants had created enough oxygen for them to breathe, at which point they died within days until the evolution of other animals)
I use this regularly use this as an example/precedent of a previous macro-cancer of the natural world that was detrimental to Earth’s ecosystem from a mistake of evolution.
The trees removed too much carbon from the atmosphere, leading to an Ice age.
We homo-sapiens are just doing the opposite. 🔥
Don’t worry though, our mother eventually found a solution to the tree’s carbon capture problem, and I have every confidence she will find a solution to us and in a few million years, nothing to her 3.8 billion year old story of life, she’ll finish cleaning up our mess. Problem solved, life will flourish, and new ecosystems in homeostasis with the Earth will develop… until the next macro-tumor of the natural world, at least.
if trees survived their self-inflected apocalypse, why can’t we?
Saying “trees” is like saying “mammals.”
Those trees from back then were different species of trees.
So, sure, mammals will survive, just like they survived the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. But we humans were not those mammals. And we won’t be the mammals that survive our self-inflicted apocalypse.
We will be long gone.
The trees clogged the land, the water, and when one inevitably got struck by lightning, continent wide forest fires were common.
IIRC, it’s these trees, not dinosaur bones that became most of the oil/gas deposits.
It’s worth noting that when it comes to a species wrecking the environment, causing mass extinction, changing the climate, or spoiling the atmosphere, humans are not the first and we’re not the worst.
We are (probably) the first to actually be (mostly) self-aware of it though. As in we could do something about it.
