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Stein, who earned his bachelor’s degree from Pomona College and master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Michigan, joined Binghamton University’s faculty in 1988. His research interests include paleobotany (the study of fossilized plants) and plant evolution, which makes for a natural fit at Binghamton, which is home to a large and distinguished collection of fossils from the Devonian era.
Stein also has a talent for drawing and photographing the specimens with which he works. That artistic ability came in handy for the Gilboa project; images of the giant fossils are on display all over Stein’s office and help provide a framework for the research going on in his lab.
Though these trees are now extinct, Stein can point to possible modern-day descendants — including ferns and horsetails — as he walks through the greenhouse on campus at Binghamton. “You go to Hawaii today, or the tropics, and you can find similar great trees with big, upright stems and fronds,” he said. “Eospermatopteris was very much like this.”
The plants in the greenhouse are like the fossils, but nevertheless impossibly remote in time and quite a bit more primitive in other aspects of their morphology, Stein notes.
Berry, who is also a paleobotanist, had been working on the group of plants that includes Wattieza since 1990. He said the discovery of the whole tree allows scientists to begin to understand the impact the plant group had on the terrestrial environment.
“In forming the first forests, they must have really changed the Earth system as a whole, creating new types of micro-environments for smaller plants and insects, storing large amounts of carbon and binding the soil together,” he said.
Landing, a paleontologist, studied the geology of the area where the fossils were found. He believes that when the trees died they fell over and became waterlogged as they traveled down a small stream. The trees then sank to the bottom at the foot of a small delta that formed in standing water. Layers of fossilized trees were found intertwined like pickup sticks in an underwater log jam in the quarry.
“Science really is these kinds of discoveries,” Stein said as he looked over photos of the new Gilboa site findings. Gazing at the images of trees that had been the very first on the planet, he concluded with discernible reverence:
“No one has ever seen this before.”
— Rachel Coker
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