Christopher Berry
speaker
160 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Christopher Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So Jenny wouldn't call it a tree.
Which is fine by me, actually.
But... Would you call it a tree, though?
In its time, it was a tree.
But we might not call it a tree now.
It was definitely something that we'd look up to if we were a small arthropod crawling around on the ground back in the Middle Devonian.
The first forests I look at as occurring over the next period of about 10 million years.
So we find probably four really good examples of what these very primitive forests were like.
If we look at the first one that was known about, the famous Gilboa fossil forest in upstate New York, we find these cladoxylopsid trees like Calamophyton, except by 10 million years later, they're actually about a metre in diameter at the base, maybe 10, 12 metres tall.
So really substantial trees.
Yet we find in the sandstone quarry in upstate New York where this forest occurs, meandering between those tree bases,
we find a woody trunk, but which is lying along the ground.
It's a new type of plant called a aneurophyte.
Very simple leaf-like twigs, again, on little branches.
If we go back maybe two million years before that, go down the hills, out of the Catskill Mountains, down into the Hudson Valley...
There's another place called Cairo.
And there's another sandstone quarry there.
On the base of that quarry, there are huge, great rooting systems.
And that is the base of another woody tree.
But this type of tree has learnt to grow upright.
Showing 21–40 of 160 · page 2 of 8
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