I am a young coal miner from ohio and i see these everyday above my head. I am always curious about what the living side of the fossils i find were like, and you never fail to inform me. Thank you PBS
Going to work as a coal miner with a deep interest in paleontology and archaeology, I cannot help but be amazed and bewildered at the mysteries that surround me. How did all these plants die? How old is coal? How is there a rainforest in ohio and what did the world look like when all these things were alive? Each day i turn to youtube or the web for more clues and to feul my fervent imagination
In school, you're taught the evolution of animals. You're not taught the evolution of plants. It's a real shame, because plants are not boring, they can be interesting. These ancient trees were very primitive compared to today's trees.
@@trvth1s i dont like using words like primitive in regards to evolution. They weren't inferior, they were just better suited to the niche of the earth back then. Modern trees are not "better" than early trees, just better adapted for the enviroment we have NOW. If you take any modern oak or pine now and planted it back then, it wouldn't thrive very well, as it is suited for modern earth. You know?
Other powerful plants include: Azolla (the fern genus that caused an ice age), sugarcane (best photosynthesis), and Sphagnum (great carbon sink similar to the plants in the video).
This channel has been an answer to my calling I have had ages ago. I've been intrigued by ferns and fauna of prehistoric Earth but can barely find much sites with info on them that don't have questionable info put together on MS Paint made in 2001. I would love more coverage on the plants during those times.
The history of bacteria is pretty much 3/4th the history of life on earth itself. Eukaryotes like plants, animals, and fungi are relatively recent newcomers.
I've seen people ask palaeontologists and paleao geeks about prehistoric viruses before, and the answer generally is: "We don't have enough fossils of viruses to say that conclusively. I guess they were around and could cause X symptoms in Y prehistoric animal?"
I absolutely LOVE this series, and the others from PBS studios. I am glad that there is a platform that will hold this knowledge to pass along to our children in a short, fun narrative. THANK YOU!!!
Fascinating, as always. So cool to see something on plants. I am loving this channel--consistently fascinating, well produced and well presented. Thank you!
pecu alex I have one in my garden, they ain't weak at all, once they get around 30 cm in diameter they are pretty rigid and strong, if you want to talk about flexible trees, look no further then pomogrande, I can normally pick the fruits from the top just by banding all the tree down to the ground and picking then, and once I let go the tree just spring into shape again, really flexible, tons of spikes, highly painful
Evi1M4chine while that is true, I'd rather build my home from a papaya tree and not a pomogrande tree, even though the pomogrande tree is strong, it's also ain't rigid, mind you, I can assume the pomogrande tree is much stronger then the papaya tree, as it's much taller yet much thinner, same for lemon tree, even though that tree is more rigid (yet still covered in spikes, making fruit picking from both trees a highly painful experience), and if we on strong plants, I also got a buganvilla bush that grows about 2 meter long branches in 8 weeks! Straight up! Very rigid branches, and decently durable, mind you they have really nasty spikes,
yoni roizman I once had to clean out a boganvillia tree that'd been left to grow for 40 years. The trunks were nearly 40cm thick and covered an area of roughly 500sqm it was insane. Some of the thorns were nearly 10cm in length.
So not only were scale trees the cause of their own mass extinction, they're the cause of the current starting one and the boosting of some hairless apes' egos? Talk about some powerful ass trees, damn
Since becoming a geologist, I often think about things like the life of an atom or molecule. It's mind-bending to imagine how long ago an atom or molecule was made, how many organisms and environments it went through when it was an active part of our ecosystem and how long it's been lying dormant just to have me come along and interact with it. Also, I often think about what else my atoms and molecules will go through after I'm done with them.
This video is short but really does a good job of connecting plants, animals and us (our material needs) accross time and space. Really awesome presentation too!
I done a report on this and can confirm for the post part this is accurate... lepidodendrons reached heights of 40 + metres and fell because of short shallow root plates, there were no fungi, bacteria or nematodes to ingest the wood, eventually creating coal. 90% of the coal used today is estimated to be from the carboniferous period
thank you!!! this is very useful!!! there is very little audiovisual (and pedagogic) well built material about plants... this helps a lot to understand, you are doing an incredible work, thank you very much!!
Show Suggestion: I would love to hear a rundown of the history of the earth specifically as it related to global changes in the environment. I know that there were eras like snowball earth, and high-oxygen earth, etc ... but knowing how and why these transitioned from one to another up until the present day, would be fascinating!
Learning here that there was a time when plant material could die and not decompose because the microbes that take care of that weren't around yet, is a real eye opener. I'll never take my garden compost for granted again.
Dams are terrible for the environment. A recent international study found that the methane (which is 86x more potent than CO2) they produce is far more than previously thought. If you were to replace the world's power with dams, and no fuel, the result would be the same AND you'd destroy the ecosystems along the way. Dams only get a blind eye because there are only around 4000 of them, which reduces their overall impact. If you were to increase this number to replace fuel, well, we are back at square one.
@Remove Talos Arguably the best? Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima pretty much shut that argument right down. Not to mention all the accidents and mistakes that the French nuclear power plants have had over the decades, like around a dozen or so. More than a couple of them could have easily lead to a disaster like one of the three previous I mentioned. Nevermind the fact that utility-scale solar with storage is almost exactly the same price as nuclear power, and solar provides more jobs and receives less in subsidies. And wind is even cheaper than solar. Sure, you have the hassle of having to store the excess energy for when it's needed. But you don't have to store radioactive waste for thousands of years. (not even the newer reactors they're designing solves that problem, just a lot fewer thousands of years is required)
@@lordgarion514 Yasss, solar is GREAT! Cleaning the cells will provide easy jobs and not necessarily life threatening compared to the height of wind turbines. They are silent too, while not as romantic as wind turbines.
Its nice to watch a video about the past and be amazed and and find out something new, this channel has shown me a lot that I didn't know or new things about stuff I thought I knew about. Keep up the good work!
agreed (If it were possible). It might at least somewhat mitigate the current state of things...and since we have those decomposers now, the trees might not wipe themselves out this time.
It's not that these species were particularly effective carbon dioxide sinks - it's that the decomposers that would break them down today had not yet evolved. If you grew a bunch of scale trees now, they'd rot and release carbon dioxide just like modern trees.
Crazy to think that depending on your location, some portion of the energy going into playing this video was once captured and stored by the trees the video is about.
Could you do a video explaining the prehistoric timeline in general? I get confused as to what happened first and what followed. Maybe just make a whole CrashCourse out of this stuff!
Well I be damned, I live in an area with piles of rock dug up when they were coal-mining here back in the days and those have literally tons of fossils of plants and much of them do look like you show in the video. So now I actually know what those things are :D
And the Quillworts are their closest living relatives carrying nearly all the features that made them unique except the tree part so perhaps they aren't completely gone but their heyday is shurely long gone. Truly strange and remarkable flora.
If we engineer such trees it will not help. Like the video stated bacteria would just release the CO2 trapped in their tissues back into the atmosphere
I liked the background music for this episode. Not sure if it has been used before, but I enjoyed it. Also, what species of tree has grown tallest in Earth's history?
Speaking of Eons you should probably mention that the history of Earth can roughly be divided into 4 eons. The Hadeon Eon, the Archaen Eon, the Proterozoic Eon, and the Phaneorozoic Eon.
This is a great example of how our climate is so dependent on the balance of CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere. Shouldn't come as a surprise that when you release the CO2 from coal and other fossil fuels stored during the carboniferous, you are changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and causing global warming. Love these videos.
I would love to learn more about lepidodendrons. I recently read something about how they can only make branches in symmetrical dichotomous pairs off the tips of older branches instead of making new ones, which would eventually get so thin their vascular system couldn't get food or water up there and they'd die and that the end of their branches is the only place they could make reproductive organs so after reproducing they would die. Any more interesting tidbits like that would be great.
The fossils of those are really cool. Or even Stignaria (fossil roots of Lepidendron/Sigilaria), that pattern, which had also on roots (but only after branching roots) is quite satisfying.
You guys should do an episode on the crocodilomorphs that competed with the early dinosaurs during the triassic, before the dinosaurs became the dominant group!!! I've always been very interested in this but information is scarce.
I do watch Trey the Explainer, and he's great! And I did see that episode, but it still doesn't cover crocodilian/crocodiloform/crocodilomorph evolution and the entire massive clade of these reptiles which nearly outcompeted dinosaurs during the triassic. Plus, armadillosuchus was a cretacious crocodilomorph, and existed far later than their "golden age" as it were. - but thanks anyhow, I appreciate suggestions
I love this Paleo-chanel, this video is magnificent !!! A new Paleontological chanel is great ! Welcome to Paleo-RU-vid Family ! I would have liked to have your animations for my video on Lepidodendracea!
So can like a single time traveler bring one of these guys into the modern era and plant a bunch of them to help combat global warming? That'd probably be a useful thing right about now.
It's very weird to use modern days continents to talk about sometimes that lived when they didn't exist. And it's just wrong to say that they were most common in "Northern America". The Pangea were then in the process of being formed. Just consider that you can find coal on any continent. Since a video on the evolution of virus would be boring (I've no idea why people are asking for this - it's not because it sounds edgy that it'll be cool), I'd rather ask for something on the evolution of squids. There was a very short mention about that in the video about the colours of the dinosaur, I'd be curious to know more.
The names of the continents are based on the actual continental plates. They slide around, rearrange themselves, sometimes drier or more covered by water in certain places; but they still exist, and have existed for billions of years, and those are their names in modern science. A "supercontinent" like Pangea is a label for a temporary arrangement of several plates together, but the plates themselves still have their own names. A particular plate like North America predates the existence of life itself on this planet.
animist channel Ever hear of subduction? That's when plates are swallowed down and are eliminated. Plates also fracture forming new plates. So the same plates we have today haven't always been around as you're stating.
Napishtim Christopher Scotese has some interesting animations as to how the earth may have looked through the ages based on plate tectonics. The Carboniferous age interpretations are very interesting and it looks like most of the land masses were located in the Southern Hemisphere. He has a channel on RU-vid to view.
Okay, Rebeldoug, here's "subduction 101" in short for you: In "subduction," the sea floor slides UNDER the upper continental plates (from the Latin for "to lead under" ) due to sideways pressure from the mid-oceanic rifts, so the sea floor recycles itself about every 200-300 million years. This is because the main granite regions of the continental plates are lighter than the sea floor material, so the continents literally float on the basalt seabed of the oceans. As the sea floor slides under the granite slabs of the "proper" continents, it gets pressed back down against the outer mantle, basically re-forging or re-melting it in the depths. This is why it's basically impossible to get fossil records from the sea beds from before the Triassic Period, because all that evidence has been swept under the upper continental structures and melted back down into magma. The seabed is constantly being replaced by outflow from the mid-oceanic rifts, a continuous chain of volcanic mountain ranges under water that run in a swirly pattern all around the globe, like the laces on a baseball. These snake around the world in such a curvy fashion that it is something like 80,000 kilometers long, constantly pushing against the edges of the major continental plates and causing earthquakes and rebound tsunamis from the slow-motion friction. This is how most of the active earthquake zones are along the edges and seams. Meanwhile, the upper granite sections of the continental plates - in various levels of flooded or dry zones depending on the amount of glaciation that affects sea level itself - keep floating on top of the sea beds like boats on a river. The North American Plate, for example (which I think is the largest) actually includes most of the Arctic Ocean and parts of current Kamchatka and northeast Siberia. Yes, there are little splinters of plates that have happened, like the Juan de Fuca Plate in the USA Pacific Northwest, but these represent a tiny portion of the total in area, and they also float there until something makes them drift away. The main body of the plates have been floating over the seabed since the earth first cooled enough for lighter surface rocks to solidify. Bedrock surface layers, exposed by erosion or glacial action in the central parts of North America and Africa where volcanoes have not disrupted the surface, have been dated to as far back as 4 billion years. They are and have always been a place (even though that place floats around the globe), and so it is fitting to recognize them with whatever name they have currently been using when we refer to their ancient past. Relatively speaking, they were always there :)
Bizarre. The background music, no mention of how releasing all that CO2 back into the atmosphere is a really bad idea...is this the Koch brothers messing with PBS again?
1) background music rocks! 2) the fact that co2 is bad is kind of obvious by this point, and I think most people that are watching this because they're interested in science will know that
This is an actual science channel, where it is known that human CO2 emissions are less than 4% of the total. You can go and watch Al Gore's gospels if that's not your liking.
Brothersingaming... Please define in scientific terms: "Bizarre. The background music, no mention of how releasing all that CO2 back into the atmosphere is a really bad idea...is this the Koch brothers messing with PBS again?" That isn't even a sentence. There is nothing "Bizarre" about this video. "What does this comment have to do with science? Nothing whatsoever! "the background music"... very cogent to the subject. It is merely an opinion. A lame opinion. Why should it be necessary to go into the negative effects of coal burning? There are thousands of videos on the subject. That isn't the topic here. The material concerns something altogether different from commentary on global warming. The comment in question is a conflation of 2 separate subjects, separated by hundreds of millions of years. This video obviously concerns a vanished life form related to the origin of coal, not the consequences of burning fossil fuels. This is an uninformed opinion from a mumble mouth who doesn't get the material , and is also bad English. It has no bearing on the subject at hand. Call it what you will. "bad" is not an accepted term in the scientific lexicon. People find critical thinking is too time consuming and prefer to just run their mouth without concerning themselves about what comes out. Cheers and thanks for the comment.
Coal is so cool man but I love the irony in humans pumping excess CO2 in the atmosphere which is pushing Earth into a warming period when it was the opposite for those trees
I live in Turtle Creek PA and there’s two formations the Monongahela and Casselman. Both have scale trees and a ton of horsetail and fern fossils that you can find by poking around the hillsides. The coal that we have is called Pittsburgh coal and it also has a ton of fossils in it. I got bored during COVID and started rooting around looking for stuff to do
This channel's episodes are so well written it puts to shame nearly everything else. PBS Studios is cuting a swat through mediocrity, and it should be celebrated.
