Just over a two hour drive from NYC stands a forest that once stood as the stomping grounds for dinosaurs. Though today it’s about half the size of a U.S. football field, much smaller than the 250-miles-worth of land it used to cover, it’s said to be the world’s oldest forest.
According to BBC, scientists from University of Binghamton and the University of Cardiff in Wales knew the ancient forest, which stretches from New York to Pennsylvania, existed, but just earlier this year it was finally properly investigated for the first time.
The teams are trying to find out the ages of the plants and trees that can be found growing there, though 385-million-year-old rocks within the forest show that some of the plants are old enough to have been seen by dinosaurs.
The forest was discovered in 2009 at the bottom of an abandoned quarry in Cairo, New York. Through forest mapping and looking at different fossils found in the area, scientists discovered that it’s the oldest forest found on Earth so far–even older than the Amazon rainforest (which likely formed over 56 million years ago) and the Yakushima Forest in Japan.
The discovery of the forest plays an important role in understanding the planet’s climatic evolution. Science writes that the trees found in this forest helped absorb carbon dioxide from the air and lock it away, altering Earth’s climate and radically shifting the atmosphere to support human life.
“The Cairo site is very special,” said Christopher Berry, a paleobotanist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, according to Science. “You are walking through the roots of ancient trees. Standing on the quarry surface we can reconstruct the living forest around us in our imagination.”
If you were looking to set out on a hike through the world’s oldest forest we’ve unfortunately got some bad news–the forest cannot currently be visited by the public as the quarry is owned by the Town of Cairo and is strictly reserved for scientific study.
Though we’re hoping one day we’ll get to say we walked through the same forest that predates even the dinosaurs!