中国北方发现具有2.98亿历史年的远古森林

一个距今约2.98亿年的远古化石森林在中国北方乌达煤田附近被发现。

这个面积为10763平方英尺（约1000平方米）的成煤沼泽森林因被一座古老火山喷发的火山灰埋藏，就像罗马古城庞贝一样保存了下来。

The remarkable find--to be described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences--gives a "snapshot" of the climate and ecology at the time of the eruption. It was the result of a collaboration between University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn and Jun Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yi Zhang of Shenyang Normal University and Zhuo Feng of Yunnan University.

《美国国家科学院院报》评价说这是一次“了不起的发现”，就像给火山爆发时当地的气候和生态环境拍下了“快照”。

这是宾西法尼亚大学古植物学家Hermann Pfefferkorn和中国科学院王军、沈阳师范大学张易（音译）与云南大学丰卓（音译）的合作研究成果。

"It's marvelously preserved," Pfefferkorn said of the forest in a written statement released by Penn. "We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That's really exciting."

“不可思议，它保存得非常好，”Pfefferkorn在宾夕法尼亚大学发表的一份关于这个远古化石森林的书面声明中表示：“我们就站在那里，首先发现一根带有树叶的树枝，之后就能顺藤摸瓜，找到更多的树枝，最后还能找到这棵树的树桩！这真是太令人兴奋了。”

Those sentiments were echoed by Robert Gastaldo, a paleobiologist at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

缅因州沃特维尔科尔比学院的古植物学家Robert Gastaldo也为此兴奋不已。

“This is a wonderful study,” Gastaldo told Nature. “Many of these plant groups we knew from other places, but we had no idea that they actually grew together.”

“这项研究意义非凡，”Gastaldo在接受《自然》杂志采访时表示，“这些植物类群里有很多种，我们以前都从其他地方发现并了解过，但是我们并不知道它们其实可以在一起共生。”