An evidence of forest fire, as old as 430 million years has been discovered in South Wales. It appears that some burned relics which were primordial were trapped in extremely old mudstone. These evidences date back to Silurian Period of Earth’s history. At that time, only few evolving plants could make to land, therefore, historians are queried for the fact that caused fire and produced charcoal. Most of them believe it to be forest of giant fungi.
A palaeobotanist clarified that the Silurian vegetation then and now has vast difference, where in ancient times there were no woody plants and most the shrubbery was very small. As per the palaeobotanist, there was a giant that dominated the landscape and also there was an enigmatic fossil called Prototaxites. It grew anything from 8m in height to a metre in diameter. A sort of funky, homogenous fungus. It was these strange organisms that went up in blazes and left blackened traces. The Welsh mudstone was drilled-out of Rumney, a Cardiff neighbourhood he also added that British Isles, in other words, would have been in Southern Hemisphere while these were being deposited.
The rock reveals a near shore marine setting indicating that the charcoal bits were being carried out to sea. This fact alone is informative as it shows Prototaxites fires were massive and destructive that still have left marks. The palaeobotanist has similar evidences in Winnica, in the Kielce region of Poland.
The observation jointly pushes the earliest evidence of wildfire on Earth which occurred 10 million years back. This experiment also reveals the level of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere during Silurian era. The concentration of O2 in air was approximately 21%. It took million years to terraform the photosynthetic algae.
According to Dr Glasspool a palaeobotanist, there are three things that trigger fire such as source of fuel which surprisingly is present in sufficient amounts in Silurian; a source of ignition, best example of this could be lightning strikes and thirdly 16% of atmospheric oxygen.
