Older than Dirt

Why don’t ferns get constipated? With fronds like that, who needs enemas!!

As surprising as it seems, some of the plants and trees that we now grow in our yards have been around for millions of years. In fact the first land plant in Canada grew in what is now the Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec some 400 million years ago.

Even the prosaic fern has a long and checkered past. Fossil fern fronds are found in Devonian sediments dating back almost 390 million years ago, predating the dinosaurs by more than 165 million years. A trip to the Cape Breton coal fields in Nova Scotia would shed some light on how the ferns flourished over the millennia.

Coal is the only fossil fuel to actually contain fossils. The plethora of fern fossils contained in the Pennsylvanian age coal in the Acadian basin indicates that their range and variety had increased enormously in the following 70 million years. These selfless plants that gave their life so long ago that we may have heat and light in our modern world, tell a story of a warm tropical jungle bordering a salt water ocean that existed not only in Eastern Canada but over much of the northeastern United States as well.

The coal beds of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and eastern British Columbia tell a much different tale. Most of the fossilized vegetation found in the seams of the western Canadian coal beds tells of a time of cooler temperatures and recognizable tree species such as pine birch and willow that were associated with not only fresh water but with dinosaurs as well.