After shovelling aside ancient soil and using brushes to delicately uncover the stumps, Basinger found himself in a time-frozen, once-lush forest similar to the present Cypress Swamp in Florida’s Everglades. The forest was so well-preserved in soil and sediment since its embalming 45 million years ago that its dawn redwoods and water firs had retained their woody character-unlike stony petrified forests.īasinger found 15 to 20 layers of slightly blackish stumps measuring up to one metre in diameter and several 10-m logs exposed on a 100-m slope of barren hillside within sight of the awesome ice cap that covers Axel Heiberg’s central highland. What Basinger explored less than 1,100 km south of the North Pole was about half a square mile of forest from the early Tertiary Era-a prehistoric period when flying lemurs and crocodiles ruled the earth about 20 million years after the dinosaurs disappeared. Last week, after camping at the site for two weeks, Basinger disclosed what Tudge had seen from the air: a 45-million-year-old fossil forest which has been preserved more than 1,500 km north of the Arctic Circle. When he landed at Eureka on Ellesmere Island, Tudge phoned Neil McMillan of the Geological Survey of Canada who in turn alerted University of Saskatchewan scientist James Basinger, a specialist in fossil plants. As he drew closer he saw that they were logs-and stumps. Last summer, while flying his Bell 06 helicopter on a geological survey over remote Axel Heiberg Island in Canada’s supposedly treeless Far North, pilot Paul Tudge noticed some spots on a hill.
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