As a scientist I am fascinated by stories about how our current earth developed over time. Here is a great story I saw today on Facebook from The Guardian describing a new fossil find of a forest that is dated as about 386 million years old. This was before modern animals and plants and the trees back then were not like the trees we have now. The only animal life was millipede-like critters and some insects that may not even have been able to fly. But the trees helped change our atmosphere into something more hospital for life than what was present back then. You can read more about the trees and how they contributed to the development of our modern atmosphere here.

The find dates to about 2-3m years older than the previously oldest known fossil forest. Photograph: William Stein/Christopher Berry/PA