Extinct Plants That Would Wreck The Earth If They Were Alive Today

Publish date: 2024-05-08

Around 359 to 299 million years ago, plants truly took ownership of Earth. According to UCMP Berkeley, it was a hot, humid world, and the first true forests blanketed the land. Few animals had left the seas, with the few land dwellers including giant amphibians the size of hawks extremely large in size, as per JSTOR Daily.

Many plants grew in coastal swamps, not entirely unlike the tropical mangroves today. Others like Lepidophoios thrived in a variety of habitats, as an old paper from the Journal of Ecology explains. Lepidophoios was one of the more adaptable trees of the Carboniferous period. Early trees like these were known as scale trees, because of the appearance of their bark, with its eerie similarity to snakeskin. 

During this time frame, there were so many plants growing on Earth that the air was rich with much more oxygen than today. This made the world a dangerous place. As National Geographic explains, that oxygen allowed insects and spiders to grow to enormous sizes, but far more dangerous were the wildfires. A study published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology talks about how wildfires were intense and widespread back then. With air so rich in oxygen, even a single lightning strike could cause vicious firestorms, hot-burning and hard to extinguish. All of this was no setback to trees like Lepidophoios, which rapidly grew back, taking advantage of the newly cleared land.

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