* Astronomy

The tree stood tall and spindly in the hot sun some 380 million years ago when something toppled it, maybe a storm or an earthquake.
It fell into water and dammed up a muddy delta. The mud and sand on top hardened into sedimentary rock, hiding the fossilized tree for eons - until Frank Mannolini came by with a hammer and chisel.
Over the last three years, Mannolini and his fellow New York State Museum fossil hunter Linda VanAller Hernick painstakingly uncovered and curated the tree crown and a separate trunk specimen found in a remote rock quarry in upstate New York.

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Remnants from a cave embedded in a limestone quarry southwest of Chicago have yielded a fossil trove that may influence the known history of north central Illinois some 310 million years ago....The scientists think that a shallow sea covering today's north central Illinois during the geological Ordovician period about 450 million years ago formed the limestone. The caves were eroded in the limestone at the beginning of the Pennsylvanian period, about 315 million years ago. Within a few million years, sand, mud and organic debris from plants and animals -- some burned and turned to charcoal -- washed into the cave through surface openings, where it remained preserved but not compacted since that time.

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Latitude: 41.476309°N, Longitude: 88.438987°W
(rough location)

Although the rainforest may be alien, its circumstances aren't. The trees lived during a global warming period that eventually melted ice caps and reshaped coastlines. Researchers think that a massive die-off of the telephone-polelike lycopsid trees, certain fern species, and some marine creatures occurred around the same time. Paleobotanists have long wondered if the extinction resulted from the climate change, or if tectonic shifts that released CO2 into the atmosphere caused the extinction and the climate change.
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Geologists have found the remains of a huge underground rainforest hidden in a coal mine in Illinois. The fossil forest, buried by an earthquake 300 million years ago, contains giant versions of several plant types alive today.
The forest is not the oldest to be discovered others are known that are up to 370 million years old it is the sheer size of the forest that is significant. It has allowed Falcon-Lang and his colleagues to show that the distribution of plant species that made up the forests in the Carboniferous era differed from region to region, rather than being randomly mixed.

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