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Name : Fossil Forest , Dorset
positioning : West Lulworth , Dorset , England
Fossilized tree stumps in the Fossil Forest in Dorset, England.
Coordinates:50.61646643547441 , -2.241820971854925
Why it ’s unbelievable : The forest go out back to the previous Jurassic , when dinosaurs still swan Earth .
The Fossil Forest in Dorset is a 145 million - twelvemonth - old clump of bushed trees on the Jurassic Coast — a 95 - mile - retentive ( 153 klick ) stretch of coastline in southerly England litter with fossils dating to the Jurassic menses ( 201 million to 145 million twelvemonth ago ) .
The Fossil Forest sits on a cliff edge on England’s Jurassic Coast.
The Fossil Forest holds some of the strangest fossils on the Jurassic Coast thanks to throngs of tiny , algae - like germ that colonized the Tree in brief after they died . Over the eons , these colonies trapped and encrusted particles of calcium carbonate onto the trees , building living mats of limestone called thrombolites that are still seeable today .
The now - fossilized forest grow during the closing of the Jurassic full point , at a time know as the Jurassic - Cretaceous boundary . During this edge , temperature dropped and sea stage fell , exposing clean country and forming coastal plains on which new spirit , including trees , could thrive .
Ancient mintage of conifers , tree - fern and cycads sprouted on what is now the southern slide of England as the sea retrograde .
Related:390 million - year - old fossilise woodland is the oldest ever discover
Flowering plant had not yet germinate at this point in Earth ’s story , but dinosaur may well have roam the wood , allot to the websiteGeology of the Wessex Coast , which is run byIan West , a geologist and confab scientist at the University of Southampton in the U.K.
The forest was abruptly - lived because ocean levels presently rose again , overwhelm the trees in piquant urine . But rather than waste away , the roots and torso were preserved by microbe . Eventually , the trees ' trunks break off , allow behind rounded mound experience as " algal burrs " that still sit on the coastline and form the Fossil Forest .
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A few Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree trunks have been found preserved along the Jurassic Coast , but none stay at the Fossil Forest site . This is likely because visitors in tight-laced clock time plunder them , according to theJurassic Coast Trust .
The Fossil Forest ’s algal bur are site halfway up a cliff facing the English Channel . Most of the woody remains inside the burr belong to an ancient eccentric of cypress calledProtocupressinoxylon , and these stiff are still root in prehistoric soil , West wrote on Geology of the Wessex Coast .
As such , the Fossil Forest " provides information on an ancient surroundings in which late Jurassic dinosaurs lived , " West wrote .
