Fossil Forest Found in Coal

A Carboniferous forest extending some 4 square miles has been found in the ceiling of a coal mine, reported Science Daily, Live Science and News@Nature.  About 50 species have been identified, including ferns and horsetails over 10 times taller than those alive today.  News@Nature remarked that the forest contained some mangrove-like plants.  The article quoted a surprised researcher who said, “It was always assumed that mangrove plants had evolved fairly recently.”
    The fossil forest was found in 2005 but was announced today in the online journal Geology.  The area is now 100 meters underground.  The research team believes an ancient earthquake some 300 million years ago caused a sudden lowering of the area, resulting in the inundation and fossilization of the forest.  Another surprise was that the ancient forest was so diverse for such an early period.  “This discovery also shows that the fundamental processes that guide the complexity and evolution of forests has been around for hundreds of millions of years,” News@Nature said.

Is this a “mangrove-like” plant or a true mangrove?  If the latter, it sounds like a big out-of-order problem for evolution, because mangroves were not supposed to appear till the late Cretaceous (source) and these forests are Carboniferous, over 200 million years earlier.  That would be a bigger problem than finding a living dinosaur.  A quick check of the original paper in Geology (May 2007) does not reveal any mention of family Rhizophoraceae or any of the other mangroves, but that doesn’t mean they were not found.  We’ll have to see if more of the details come to light.  In any case, gymnosperms were not thought to live in “mangrove-like” habitats.
    This story also illustrates, as seen so often before, that wherever evolutionists look, they find more complexity farther back in time than they expect.