14 DAY TRIAL // This is somehow like the case of the frozen mammoths that still have meat on them. But if those mammoths are tens of thousands of years old, these trees are 8 million years, dating back from the time when Europe was a subtropical wet paradise. The trees look like ghost forests, but this rare cluster of fossilized trees can offer a lot of information to the scientists.
The 8 million-year-old swamp cypress forest was discovered recently near the village of Bukkabrany in northeastern Hungary. Miners uncovered the strange find while carving for lignite (brown coal). So far, there have been uncovered the remains of 16 trees, varying in siz from about 13 to 20 ft (4 to 6 m) tall and 5 to 10 ft (1.5 to 3 m). Researchers are amazed by the fact that the trees did not petrify (turned to stone), as fossilized trees usually do.
The trunks kept their original wood, offering to the researchers crucial clues about the geology and climate of ancient central Europe. 8 million years ago, the Pannonian Lake, covering much of present-day Hungary and its neighbors, had started to shrink. At the same time, global sea levels had started to drop, fact that made all or some of the Mediterranean Sea dry up.
"The importance of the findings is that so many trees got preserved in their original position in one place," Alfred Dulai, a geologist at the Hungarian Natural History Museum, told Reuters. "But the real rarity about these trees is that ... their original wood got preserved ... they did not turn into stone."
Today, swarm cypresses (Taxodium species) are restricted only to the warm swamps of the southeastern US and eastern Mexico. In Europe, they disappeared during the Ice Age, as they did not find a warm and wet refuge. These coniferous can grow up to 45 m (150 ft) tall.