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 really isn’t an animal. It’s our very first venture into paleobotany, in the form of a plant named Sigillaria. For those who don’t know much about prehistoric plants (including myself before researching this), the idea of talking about a fossil plant might sound boring, but I promise, there are a lot of interesting things to know about plants, especially plants from the Paleozoic Era.One of the most important landmarks in the Paleozoic was the invasion of land. For the first 100 million years of the Phanerozoic Eon, life was found only in the water. The land was completely devoid of life, the atmosphere barren and inhospitable. Plants were the first organisms to come ashore, and, while there’s a lot to talk about there, that’s a tangent for another genus. The main idea here is that plants got on land first, and plants are hardy sons of bitches. You can find plants almost anywhere. I work at a farm supply store, and we have torn bags of mulch with plants growing out of them. They aren’t particularly picky. This is pretty evident in the fossil record, where plants arrived on land and almost immediately diversified and conquered it all. Animals took much longer to catch up. By the time vertebrates were first starting to flop onto the shores of lakes, terrestrial plants were huge. It would be a long time before large herbivores would evolve, and in the meantime, those huge plants covered the surface of the earth, leading to the humid, global rainforests of the Carboniferous period. These rainforests looked quite different from the ones we know today. Sigillaria was one of the plants that made up this alien blanket of vegetation, 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 its trunk. Those leaf bases left imprints on the trunk and resulted in the pattern on the surface, which was different from species to species. Most Sigillaria specimens have only one branch of leaves. Forked trunks are pretty rare, but I drew one with a fork because it’s neat. Sigillaria reproduced with spores, like ferns. Spore-bearing plants can only live in humid environments, but since the Carboniferous was pretty much a big sauna, this wasn’t much a problem. It was found mostly in floodplains or swamps As those biomes shrank, Sigillaria’s presence in the fossil record dwindled more and more, before finally disappearing during the 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 and plants were lost that there’s almost no overlap in biota between Permian and Triassic rocks. That being said, Sigillaria was a hanger-on from the Carboniferous. Big lycopods were a diverse group back then, but towards the end of the period, the earth grew colder. The earth became drier and the global rainforests started to shrink. This event is called, fittingly enough, the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse. It wasn’t a large enough extinction event to be one of the big ones, but it caused changes that affected everything on earth. Swamps were hit the hardest, but since Sigillaria wasn’t exclusively a swamp-dweller like most of its cousins, it was able to hang on until things got really hard. That rainforest collapse was a huge part of why we have so much coal today, by the way. Places like Pennsylvania that have a whole bunch of coal also have a whole bunch of Caboniferous fossils.You wanna know something else weird about this plant? Trees live for a long time, right? They live on a timescale that can be hard to think about, sometimes. Sigillaria, though, only lived for about 10-15 years, and might have died after reproducing. This probably means they grew really, really quickly. Imagine planting a tree after seeing 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 it died. Such is life, I guess. -- source link

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