New geological archive discovered: Fossilised wood reveals 300 million years of Earth’s history
Research team uses quartz from fossilised wood to trace Europe’s development
University of Münster
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Dr Steffen Trümper is searching for silicified wood in front of the stone statue of the Staufer Emperor Frederick ‘Barbarossa’ at the Kyffhäuser Monument, which, at 81 metres, is one of the tallest monuments in Germany.
view moreCredit: Stephan Schretzenmayr/Gommern
Many people are familiar with fossilised wood as a decorative item from the museum shop. However, the fact that it can preserve the geological history of entire regions spanning millions of years is a new discovery. A research team led by geologist Dr Steffen Trümper from the University of Münster has now demonstrated for the first time that fossilised wood is a natural archive, from which the geological history of an entire region over hundreds of millions of years can be deduced. The findings extend the previously known timescales of wood mineralisation. They show that fossilised wood can record the history of subsidence in a geological basin and reveal tectonic events on a timescale of hundreds of millions of years. Specifically, the study focuses on the Saale Basin, a sedimentary basin that formed around 300 million years ago in what is now central Germany and whose rocks are among the oldest in the large Central European Basin System. The study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
For their analysis, the researchers examined fossilised wood from the Kyffhäuser Mountains in northern Thuringia in Germany. The fossils, which have been known since at least the 18th century, comprise trunks up to 20 metres long that are embedded in fluvial redbeds – that is, reddish deposits from ancient river systems. Their colour results from embedded iron oxides, which relate to a warm, seasonally dry climate. The trunks, which were covered during floods, originate from tropical dry forests on the supercontinent Pangaea. At that time, the region lay close to the equator. Around 300 million years ago, the now-extinct relatives of conifers grew here. The Kyffhäuser is regarded as a reference site for a type of deposit that formed repeatedly in various basins across Europe. Together, these sites constitute one of the most extensive occurrences of fossilised wood in the Northern Hemisphere. The rocks are among the earliest deposits of the Central European Basin, an economically significant sedimentary basin system that still harbours raw materials, groundwater and potential for geothermal energy.
The key lies in the quartz, which has permeated and replaced the wood during the fossilisation process. Initially, dissolved silicic acid penetrates the dead wood, templating the cell walls and thus preserving the finest anatomical structures. Over millions of years, these initial siliceous deposits eventually crystallised into quartz, replacing the original tissue bit by bit. The study shows that the preservation of these fossils is far more nuanced than previously thought in terms of structure, geochemistry and the age of the quartz phases. The research team identified five successive generations of silicic acid. Each of these generations contains information about the temperature, pressure and composition of the solutions from which they formed. They document five stages spanning a period of 200 million years from the late Carboniferous to the Early Cretaceous. If the subsequent uplift to the Earth’s surface is taken into account, this period extends to as much as 300 million years. This is the longest documented sequence of successive wood mineralisation stages to date.
To analyse these ‘time capsules’, the team combined numerous techniques. Using quartz cathodoluminescence, fluid inclusions, oxygen and silicon isotopes, Raman thermometry, electron-probe microanalysis and scanning-electron microscopy, as well as so-called in-situ U-Pb dating – a geochronological method for determining the age of rocks and minerals – the five stages were reconstructed. “The tiny fluid inclusions in the quartz were particularly revealing, as they preserve information about the exact conditions during crystal growth,” explains Steffen Trümper. For example, the team demonstrated that parts of the wood were once located at a depth of three to five and a half kilometres at temperatures of 160 to 240 degrees Celsius.
The findings have significance that extends far beyond the Kyffhäuser. “It is astonishing that a fossil, often no bigger than the palm of a hand, encapsulates the geological history of an entire region spanning hundreds of millions of years,” says Steffen Trümper. “A sequence of five stages of mineralisation has never before been documented in fossilised wood. As fossilised wood occurs in many rock formations worldwide, this opens up a valuable source of information. It provides science with a new tool for tracing the evolution of continents.” However, the analyses show that the suitability of fossilised wood for basin analysis depends less on the tectonic setting and more on the climatic and sedimentological conditions during its burial.
In addition to the University of Münster, the Georg August University of Göttingen, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the Museum für Naturkunde Chemnitz and the TU Bergakademie Freiberg were involved in the study.
Close-up of a sectioned silicified wood specimen from the Kyffhäuser with a horizontal diameter of approximately 20 centimetres. The white-grey patches are different light and dark quartz generations.
Credit
Steffen Trümper
Journal
Scientific Reports
Article Title
Fossil wood cells recorded 300 million years of Europe’s tectonic history
Article Publication Date
24-Jul-2026
Where was this fossil 200 million years ago?
The BIOST3 Research Group at the University of Barcelona designs a public-facing web interface to discover the Earth’s ancient geography.
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The UB BIOST3 Research Group at the University of Barcelona designs a public-facing web interface to discover the Earth’s ancient geography.
view moreCredit: UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA
Calculating a fossil’s position throughout geological history is a complex process. In palaeontology and other disciplines, determining a location in the past is quite a challenge that requires refined computational tools to process large volumes of data. Now, the BIOST3 Research Group at the University of Barcelona has designed an open-access web interface for the general public that simplifies this process and facilitates access to high-quality palaeogeographic reconstructions. This innovative tool, the Paleocoordinates Calculator (PACA), will help to overcome the technological barrier to facilitate access to high-quality paleogeographic reconstructions.
This powerful and accessible tool for palaeogeographic research and education is now presented in an article in the journal Scientific Reports. The authors are experts Noa Scholz-Murcia, Alejandro Rodríguez-Mena, Víctor Madarnás-Gómez and Antonio Monleón-Getino, from the Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics at the UB’s Faculty of Biology.
Open and reproducible science
The ambition to map and understand the Earth’s geography has driven major technological revolutions that have enabled the current precision of cartography. Traditional tectonic reconstruction software usually requires programming skills or the use of complex programmes.
PACA helps to explore the Earth’s ancient geography and transforms current positions into palaeocoordinates using state-of-the-art plate tectonics models.
“This innovative interface removes methodological barriers: you simply upload a CSV file containing the current coordinates and the geological age of the find to obtain the exact paleocoordinates in seconds,” explains Professor Antonio Monleón-Getino, head of the BIOST3 Research Group and member of the Bioinformatics Barcelona (BIB) platform.
In line with the principles of open science, both the PACA source code and the 3D conversion scripts are publicly available on the Zenodo repository. The new tool developed by BIOST3 offers an efficient way to process large volumes of data and also actively promotes transparency and reproducibility in the Earth sciences. Through PACA, any researcher or user, regardless of their computing background, will be able to trace locations back through geological time.
A bridge between code and 3D visualization
The mathematical core of PACA is based on the R package palaeoverse, which connects directly to the GPlates web service. “The tool allows users to compare their data simultaneously with up to five global plate models (GPM) widely used by the scientific community: PALEOMAP, GOLONKA, MERDITH2021, TorsvikCocks2017 and MATTHEWS2016_pmag_ref,” explains Noa Scholz-Murcia, first author of the article and a member of the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) at the UB.
From paleocoordinates to the interactive viewer
In addition to providing the reconstructed palaeocoordinates, PACA automatically calculates variability between models. It generates metrics such as the palaeolatitudinal range and the maximum geographical distance in kilometres between the predictions of the different models. This allows researchers to immediately assess the degree of tectonic uncertainty in the study area.
The interface can export the optimized tables for statistical analyses, and features an interactive 3D viewer developed with React and Blender. This module projects the calculated points directly onto the palaeogeographic maps of the prestigious PALEOMAP Project, created by geographer Christopher Scotese and adapted to the International Chronostratigraphic Table.
Maximum precision without installation requirements
However, does replacing the desktop software affect accuracy? “Absolutely not,” says the BIOST3 team, which carried out a cross-validation with 142 reconstructions distributed globally.
The results demonstrated an almost perfect mathematical equivalence with the traditional GPlates workflow: an average spatial error of less than 17 metres, an insignificantly small distance on a planetary scale, a concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 1,000 across all models, and no evidence of systematic biases in the automated processing.
The PACA interface was designed as part of the research project “Cretaceous Resin Interval. Abiotic and biotic causes and their palaeoecological implications (CREI)”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and coordinated by experts Antonio Monleón-Getino and Xavier Delclòs, from the Faculty of Earth Sciences and the IRBio. The CREI project studies the massive production of resin during a Cretaceous period that allowed the formation of many fossil resin deposits known today as amber.
Noa Scholz-Murcia, first author of the article and a member of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) at the University of Barcelona.
Credit
UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA
Journal
Scientific Reports
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
A user-friendly online tool for paleocoordinate calculation and 3D visualization
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