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Today, ponytails are small. Millions of years ago they had 1 5 m high. Horsetails |
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By schema, try to find the names of the plants in the larger picture. |
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The air was hot and humid. Soil, soft and slimy. Dragonflies with wings as long as your arm buzzed through the air. Cockroaches as big as your fist ran. Everywhere there were thickets of tall, strange trees and other kinds of plants..
This was a forest during the Carboniferous period, what happened ago 300 millions of years.
We say Carboniferous period because the trees and plants that lived then were transformed into the coal that we currently consume. The plants of these forests grew, they died and fell. These dead plants were squeezed next to each other. Slowly, for millions of years, they were transformed into the coal that we now consume.
Some of the trees in the carboniferous forests looked like Christmas trees. Others were not trees, but some strange giant plants. One of them was an ancient relative of the little plant called horsetail that currently lives next to lakes and ponds.. Current horsetails do not reach more than a meter in height. But the ones that lived in the carboniferous forests were giants over 15 m high.
