Selb (Bavaria) – Did the prehistoric animals perhaps already suffer from hay fever in spring? This idea doesn’t seem impossible. Researchers have discovered 20-million-year-old tree pollen in a volcanic crater in the Fichtel Mountains.
Thanks to this find near the town of Selb (Wunsiedel district), the forest of that time can now be reconstructed, the Bavarian State Office for the Environment (LfU) announced on Monday. At that time there was no spruce forest in the mountains in eastern Upper Franconia.
The State Office for the Environment is researching previous volcanic activity in the region near Selb (Bavaria). The area was volcanically active until the Stone Age
Millions of years ago I had one Volcanic eruption A 70 meter deep crater was blasted into the subsoil of the Fichtel Mountains, said Roland Eichhorn, head of the geological service at the LfU: “The natural disaster back then turns out to be a stroke of luck for today’s research.”
They were born exactly in this volcano hole Pollen preserved over millions of years.
The LfU commissioned geoscientists from the Technical University of Darmstadt to collect fossil pollen from the volcanic crater. This is how the researchers discovered the primeval forest!
According to the investigations, after the volcanic explosion on the slopes of Bavarian In the crater, ferns first grew, then elms and hickory, a genus of trees from the walnut family that now grows mainly in North America and East Asia. Only gradually did the original return Mixed forest from pine, spruce, copper beech, chestnut and walnut plants.
