Permian vegetation of the Wuda Fossil Site

The Wuda fossils represent an exceptional record of an ancient forest that has been termed the Permian “vegetational Pompeii” (Wang et al., 2012). The forest was peat-forming and buried in place by ashfall, now appearing as a tuff bed between two coal seams in the Wuda Coalfield, Inner Mongolia. The tuff is dated to 298.34 ± 0.09 Ma from the earliest Permian and lies approximately on the Carboniferous-Permian boundary (Schmitz et al., 2021). Plant remains are preserved as unusually complete plants showing gross form, but also are often partly permineralized preserving internal structure. Vegetation includes more than 50 species from seven groups, namely lycopsids, sphenopsids, filicalean ferns, progymnosperms, seed ferns, early conifers and cycads. Many lines of evidence record insect-plant interactions (e.g., feeding) and plant-plant interactions (e.g., climbing, Zhou et al., 2019), preserving intricate details of an ancient tropical rain forest community and interplay between different organisms.
This unique “Permian Coal Forest offers a glimpse of late Paleozoic ecology” (Bashforth and DiMichele, 2012) and has been headlined as “Primeval Land Rises from the Ashes: A ‘vegetational Pompeii’ buried in a coal deposit that is shedding light on ecosystem structure and climate during the Permian period” in SCIENCE by Hvistendahl (2012).