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ALBANY, NY -- Nature, a leading international journal of science, has reported the discovery of the world’s most intact fossils of Earth’s oldest tree by two researchers at the New York State Museum.

The tree’s intact crown, discovered in June 2004, and a 28-foot long trunk portion of the same species found the following summer, have been pieced together to represent Wattieza, which resembles a modern-day tree fern, and has a palm tree-like shape that evolved repeatedly through time in several plant groups. With an attached crown of fronds, the tree grew up to 30 feet high and reproduced through spores. Nature reports that the 380-million-year-old “stunning specimens” found in Schoharie County mark the first time paleontologists have seen the upper portions of this Devonian-Period tree, rather than just the stumps.

The discovery solves a mystery that has puzzled scientists for more than a century. Fossil tree stumps, rooted and in situ (in life position), were discovered in 1870 when workers were blasting in a quarry in Gilboa to obtain rock to repair roads damaged by a major flood. The Gilboa stumps have been “widely cited as evidence of the Earth’s ‘oldest forest,’ ” the Nature paper reports. However, until this latest discovery, scientists have never seen the upper portions of the tree.

“Now the riddle is solved and we know what was out there,” says Linda VanAller Hernick, the Museum’s Paleontology Collection manager and one of the co-authors of the Nature paper. She and her colleague Frank Mannolini, Paleontology Collection technician, made the two latest discoveries.

For both of them the discovery was fueled by a passion that was both personal and professional. Hernick had been interested in the Gilboa fossils since she was a child growing up in Schoharie County.

She saw an outdoor exhibit near Gilboa about the Gilboa stumps, and loved visiting the Gilboa forest restoration exhibit, an icon of the State Museum in its former location in the State Education Department building on Washington Avenue in Albany.

One of the Gilboa exhibit’s key planners was Winifred Goldring, who joined the State Museum in 1914 and served as the nation’s first female state paleontologist from 1939 to 1954. A paleobotanist, she worked tirelessly to study and interpret the Gilboa fossils. She produced drawings of the “Gilboa
tree,” which appeared in a paper that was published in 1924, and have been reproduced in hundreds of books and articles since.

The Museum’s Gilboa exhibit “had a profound effect on me,” Hernick recalls. She was eventually hired as a paleontology technician at the Museum, and worked side-by-side with Sharon Mannolini to search for fossils in Schoharie County as often as they could.

In 2003 the State Museum published a book by Hernick, “The Gilboa Fossils.” Complete with photos and drawings, the book chronicles the history and significance of the fossils, Goldring’s research and the development and success of the museum exhibit.

After Sharon Mannolini’s untimely death, Frank was hired by the Museum and eventually stepped into her position, determined to carry on his sister’s work. Hernick and Mannolini made their first discovery while they were searching for fossils in a small Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) sandstone quarry that was previously well known in the scientific literature for fossils of land plants and arthropods. The quarry is about 10 miles from where the Gilboa stumps had been found.

DEC was about to excavate the quarry to obtain stone for road repair and had given the Museum access to the site. After the discovery was made DEC offered its support and gave the Museum permission to continue collecting at the site indefinitely.

It took several weeks before Hernick and Mannolini were able to remove the 400-pound fossil using an industrial saw, pickup truck and manual engine hoist. Their second find – the fossilized tree trunk -- was recovered in large chunks and was carefully pieced back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Since the discovery, Hernick and Mannolini have worked with their co-authors of the Nature paper – scientific experts who have studied and interpreted the fossils and the environment in which they were found. They are Dr. Ed Landing, state paleontologist, and paleobotanists Dr. William Stein, associate professor of biology at the State University of Binghamton, and Dr. Christopher M. Berry, a paleobotany lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales.

Berry had been working on the same group of plants that include Wattieza since 1990 and had undertaken a tentative reconstruction of the extinct plants using fragmentary fossils from Belgium and Venezuela where the tree also lived. He said the discovery of the whole tree allows scientists to begin to understand the impact the plant group had on the terrestrial environment.

“In forming the first forests, they must have really changed the Earth system as a whole, creating new types of micro-environments for smaller plants and insects, storing large amounts of carbon and binding the soil together,” said Berry.

Landing, who studied the geology of the area where the fossils were found, believes that when the
trees died they fell over, became waterlogged as they traveled down a small stream, and sank to the bottom at the foot of a small delta that formed in standing water. Layers of fossilized trees were found intertwined like pickup sticks in an underwater log jam in the quarry.

When the trees were living, terrestrial animal life in the area was confined to tiny arthropods. “The trees preceded dinosaurs by 140 million years,” said Landing. There was nothing flying, no reptiles and no amphibians.”

Stein, a paleobotanist who specializes in the Devonian Period, noted that the discovery of the
fossils provide the first concrete information on the overall shape and size of the earth’s oldest trees.

“This information is crucial,” he said, “to understanding how forests came to dominate the land
surface at that time, and fundamentally shape the Earth’s terrestrial ecology even today.”

For Hernick, the discovery was the realization of a longtime goal. “It has always been my dream to work on this,” she said. The Gilboa tree, as described by Winifred Goldring in the 1920s “was cutting-edge paleobotany. The State Museum has now been able to solve the mystery that remained and it seems appropriate in the tradition of the Museum that we were able to do that.”

The New York State Museum in Albany is a cultural program of the New York State Education Department .Founded in 1836, the museum has the longest continuously operating state natural
history research and collection survey in the U.S. Further information can be obtained by calling (518) 474-5877 or visiting the museum website at www.nysm.nysed.gov.

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