The world's first forests were built by trees that lacked actual leaves

Gardening · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: For over a century, scientists knew of mysterious fossilized stumps in New York but could not imagine the full tree. It took 130 years to connect those ancient roots to a crown of delicate, forked branches, revealing the Earth's earliest forest giants: the prehistoric Wattieza.

Discovered in the 1870s near Gilboa, New York, the fossilized stumps of Eospermatopteris were long known to science. These remnants, preserved in marshy lowlands near an ancient inland sea, represented only the bottom 0.5 to 1.5 metres of the plants. For generations, the true form, height, and evolutionary identity of these specimens remained a mystery, as the upper branches and foliage were entirely absent from the record.

The puzzle was finally solved in 2007, when researchers analyzed a new set of fossils found about 13 kilometres from the original site. These specimens revealed that the plants reached heights of approximately 8 metres. Rather than modern leaves, the trees were topped with branches covered in whorls of forked branchlets. These branch tips matched fossils previously discovered in Belgium and Venezuela, which had been classified under the name Wattieza. It is now understood that Eospermatopteris and Wattieza are the same organism.

Dating to the Givetian Age of the Devonian Period, roughly 387.7 million to 382.7 million years ago, these trees are considered the oldest known examples of their kind. Belonging to the extinct group Cladoxylopsida, they reproduced via spores like modern ferns or horsetails. Their unique growth pattern, involving the shedding of branches, likely created significant amounts of litter on the forest floor. This biological debris may have played a critical role in global carbon cycling and provided the necessary habitat for the evolution of early terrestrial arthropods.

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