You could look at the wiki on the Carboniferous. Apparently there was so much CO2 in the atmosphere that plants (and also insects) went nuts.
What I am really looking for is extraordinary examples of plant species that were gigantic to begin with. Something that would make today’s Giant Redwoods look like a matchstick. I assume we’d find such a thing in coal seams that were produced during this period but 1) Maybe fossil evidence is destroyed over such a long period of time? and 2) maybe it is far too difficult to capture these kinds of images when you are trying to excavate mass amounts of coal or 3) maybe the process of producing coal turns everything to mush regardless of the vast timescale afterwards?
I could probably Google these topics myself but I think this could be fun to share and anyways I bet 'dopers will have better shots to share than I would find, if they exist at all.
Got any?
Trees didn’t evolve until the Triassic period; the gigantic plants of the Carboniferous weren’t true trees, as wood hadn’t come along yet.
The modern Sequoia is not only the largest tree known, it’s probably the largest tree that ever was, or ever will be. At that, aside from multi-stemmed vegetation like the aspen or certain fungi (I’m sorry, but that just seems like cheating), it’s the biggest thing that ever lived on Earth.
Trees are restricted in height because of the way they draw water up their trunks by evaporation in the upper branches. On a planet with Earth-like gravity and Earth-like atmospheric pressure, trees can only grow to a height of around 130 metres if they draw water up from the ground. see
so even the largest Carboniferous trees would not be much bigger than today’s trees, if they even got that big.
Minor nitpick, but it was the increased level of oxygen (around 35% compared to 21% today), not CO2, that lead to insect gigantism.
Also, as already explained, the biggest plants probably weren’t any bigger than the largest plants today, but they did probably grow faster, thus more food available for animals (assuming that unlike today, more CO2 didn’t lead to lower levels of nutrients, but the plants were different then).
Well… what I had in mind would be examples of odd ancient plants found in coal deposits. Surely something like that must have survived and someone must have snapped some photos- I assume that is how we know about the plant life of the period in the first place.
But I don’t know much about it, I may just be fantasizing about enormous plants. It almost sounds like the answer is ‘no’
Yes, very nice! It would be better if they were dinosaur-scale fossils of whole giant ancient plants, but that may be asking too much. I’d really like to see a coal seam that amounts to a fossilized forest, but due to ignorance I don’t know if such a thing even exists. Pretty much everyone is fascinated by 300 million-year-old plants though, right?
One time I found a lovely fossil of a plant inside a lump of coal; the details were picked out in pyrite, so it looked like inlaid gold. Yes, there are sometimes plants preserved in coal, but usually very compressed and fragmented.
I think the nitrogen pressure has not changed significantly since then, though I might be wrong; the partial pressure of other gases such as oxygen and CO2 may have changed quite a bit since those days, but nitrogen has made up the bulk of the atmosphere since well before the Carboniferous.
