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
The other one, which is of a similar age to the two I've just described, is in Spitsbergen, about nearly 80 degrees north.
though when that forest was alive, it was on the equator.
And there we see lycopod trees growing, which is a third type of tree.
And that tree has a little bulbous base and then a trunk, which is just a column, which would have been covered in little leaves.
And when it got to a certain height, about three metres, it would then branch, start dividing into two and two and two and two, and form probably an upright crown at the top of it.
These trees are still extant today in the form of little herbaceous plants.
And then the last and the oldest fossil forest was found by a couple of Cambridge sedimentologists, Neil Davis and Will McMahon, down on the coast of Somerset.
And they sent me some pictures of some trees and they look a bit like a tyre mark from a bicycle going across the sandstone.
And I recognised immediately the pattern of branches that are found in Calamophyton, which is the oldest tree.
It's from about 390 million years.
So if we look at...
The Archaeopteris tree, the one with the big roots that we saw at Cairo in the forest, this would be a recognisable form to us because it's got big, sturdy roots.
It's got a woody trunk with some sort of bark on the outside of it.
It may have branches, but it definitely has leafy, frond-like branches attached to it, so it would have nice green leaves, and so it would probably reach a height of maybe at that time 20 metres or so.
Yes, to a certain extent.
That would be the basic thing that you might recognise, a sort of leafy pine tree, if you could imagine such a thing.
The lycopods, such as we saw in Spitsbergen, were quite different, I think, to anything that we really see today because they would grow up as a leafy trunk from the ground.
And they would grow up to, at this time, three metres maybe, and then start branching and have this branching crown of leafy, smaller branches at the top, which would then terminate in a cone.
That would be where the reproductive part was.
And I don't really know of anything that looks particularly like that today.
Showing 41–60 of 160 · page 3 of 8
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