Wassat? It's a Wattieza, the world's oldest tree

0 Comments | AFP, April, 2007

PARIS (AFP) — Fossil hunters in the United States have found the world's oldest known tree, a palm-like giant of a species called a Wattieza that lived some 380 million years ago.

Their discovery resolves a riddle that has dogged paleo-botanists for 137 years and sheds light on how forests slowly yet powerfully sculpted Earth's landscape, the team report in Thursday's Nature, the weekly British science journal.

In June 2004, Linda VanAller Hernick and Frank Mannolini of the New York State Museum found the fossilised crown of a massive tree in a small sandstone quarry in New York that had already been a fruitful site for retrieving fossils of plants and arthropods.

Racing against the clock -- for the quarry was about to be dug out to provide stone for road...