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
and so on, and back into the space, that heat comes in, it hits the plants.
As you know, tropical forests are very warm.
It absorbs heat and moisture and all the things that we've talked about.
And so the reverse effect of the forest spreading actually delayed the cooling of the planet.
And it wasn't until the very end of the Devonian that it sort of caught up, and then we descend into an ice age in the early Carboniferous.
We've gone very quiet.
One of my favourite examples of this would be from the Carboniferous, so the Carboniferous Forest.
Probably worth saying that if people want to go and see fossil forest in Britain, then head to Victoria Park in Glasgow or to the Brumbo Forest.
fossil forest near Wrexham.
You can see big fossil lycopod trees in the ground.
There's even a beach in Wales, which is a bit of a secret at the moment, but where you can see similar things.
And in Nova Scotia, on Joggins, there is a fantastic place called Joggins Fossil Forest, where you can see the bases of these lycopod trees, just like as in Britain.
But 100 or more years ago, it was found that there were reptiles
actually in the trees and they were living or falling into the bases of these rotting trees.
And some of our best evidence of what early reptilian life was like comes from inside these trees.
So that's quite remarkable.
So not in the extinct groups of plants, but if you do go into tropical forests, you can see all sorts of plants which have very, very similar habits.
usually using trees upright trees as a sort of prop and sometimes with little prop roots and things and when we had to reconstruct what this plant looked like we did go into a botanical garden and go around and look at some things which might have a similar sort of reason for being and and and so on and look for a model which is what i quite often do i go
Because anybody listening to this who's a botanist would be going, Chris, he's not a botanist.
I think it's quite obvious that I'm the geologist here.
Showing 121–140 of 160 · page 7 of 8
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