Sigillaria – Late Devonian-Late Permian (383-254 Ma)I know I’ve faked you out before, bu

Sigillaria – Late Devonian-Late Permian (383-254 Ma)I know I’ve faked you out before, but today’s animal reallyisn’t an animal. It’s our very first venture into paleobotany, in the form of aplant named Sigillaria. For those whodon’t know much about prehistoric plants (including myself before researchingthis), the idea of talking about a fossil plant might sound boring, but Ipromise, there are a lot of interesting things to know about plants, especiallyplants from the Paleozoic Era.One of the most important landmarks in the Paleozoic was theinvasion of land. For the first 100 million years of the Phanerozoic Eon, lifewas found only in the water. The land was completely devoid of life, theatmosphere barren and inhospitable. Plants were the first organisms to comeashore, and, while there’s a lot to talk about there, that’s a tangent foranother genus. The main idea here is that plants got on land first, and plantsare hardy sons of bitches. You can find plants almost anywhere. I work at afarm supply store, and we have torn bags of mulch with plants growing out ofthem. They aren’t particularly picky. This is pretty evident in the fossilrecord, where plants arrived on land and almost immediately diversified andconquered it all. Animals took much longer to catch up. By the time vertebrateswere first starting to flop onto the shores of lakes, terrestrial plants werehuge. It would be a long time before large herbivores would evolve, and in themeantime, those huge plants covered the surface of the earth, leading to thehumid, global rainforests of the Carboniferous period. These rainforests lookedquite different from the ones we know today. Sigillaria was one of the plants that made up this alien blanket ofvegetation, and it shows up quite a lot in the fossil record.This may look like a tree, but it’s actually a lycopod,placing it closer to club mosses and quillworts. It wasn’t woody, either,instead supported by jury-rigged leaf bases right under the surface of itstrunk. Those leaf bases left imprints on the trunk and resulted in the patternon the surface, which was different from species to species. Most Sigillaria specimens have only onebranch of leaves. Forked trunks are pretty rare, but I drew one with a forkbecause it’s neat. Sigillariareproduced with spores, like ferns. Spore-bearing plants can only live in humidenvironments, but since the Carboniferous was pretty much a big sauna, thiswasn’t much a problem. It was found mostly in floodplains or swamps As thosebiomes shrank, Sigillaria’s presencein the fossil record dwindled more and more, before finally disappearing duringthe Permian-Triassic extinction event. The more late Paleozoic animals I cover,the more the Great Dying is put into perspective. So many groups of animals andplants were lost that there’s almost no overlap in biota between Permian andTriassic rocks. That being said, Sigillariawas a hanger-on from the Carboniferous. Big lycopods were a diverse group backthen, but towards the end of the period, the earth grew colder. The earthbecame drier and the global rainforests started to shrink. This event iscalled, fittingly enough, the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse. It wasn’t alarge enough extinction event to be one of the big ones, but it caused changesthat affected everything on earth. Swamps were hit the hardest, but since Sigillaria wasn’t exclusively a swamp-dwellerlike most of its cousins, it was able to hang on until things got really hard. That rainforest collapsewas a huge part of why we have so much coal today, by the way. Places likePennsylvania that have a whole bunch of coal also have a whole bunch ofCaboniferous fossils.You wanna know something else weird about this plant? Treeslive for a long time, right? They live on a timescale that can be hard to thinkabout, sometimes. Sigillaria, though,only lived for about 10-15 years, and might have died after reproducing. Thisprobably means they grew really, really quickly. Imagine planting a tree afterseeing Revenge of the Sith in theaters,and then having a 100ft (30m) plant in your backyard by the time The Force Awakens came out. And then itdied. Such is life, I guess. -- source link

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