Another
extinct tree, the Cordaites, rivalled the Horsetails and
Club-mosses in height, and its showers of long and extraordinary
leaves, six feet long and six inches in width, pointed to the
higher plant world that was to come. Between these gaunt towering
trunks the graceful tree-ferns spread their canopies at heights
of twenty, forty, and even sixty feet from the ground, and at the
base was a dense undergrowth of ferns and fern-like seed-plants.
Mosses may have carpeted the moist ground, but nothing in the
nature of grass or flowers had yet appeared.
Imagine this dense assemblage of dull, flowerless trees pervaded
by a hot, dank atmosphere, with no change of seasons, with no
movement but the flying of large and primitive insects among the
trees and the stirring of the ferns below by some passing giant
salamander, with no song of bird and no single streak of white or
red or blue drawn across the changeless sombre green, and you
have some idea of the character of the forests that are
compressed into our seams of coal. Imagine these forests spread
from Spitzbergen to Australia and even, according to the south
polar expeditions, to the Antarctic, and from the United States
to Europe, to Siberia, and to China, and prolonged during some
hundreds of thousands of years, and you begin to realise that the
Carboniferous period prepared the land for the coming dynasties
of animals.
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