A giant fossil rainforest was found in an Illinois coal mine three years ago. The findings are published in the May 2007 issue of Geology. National Geographic also did a piece on it Tuesday.
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What's amazing is the size of the discovery:
"The forest covers four square miles (a thousand hectares) and features an abundance of huge leaf impressions, large trunks of extinct trees, and tree-size horsetail plants..."Want to know what it all looks like?
"Imagine an artist's canvas that's covered in gray flat paint—that's what gray shale kind of looks like.
"The plant fossils stand out in that grayness as black impressions, and they look just like pressed leaves in a book."
So just think of Illinois, next time you burn some of that good old fossil fuel.
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