Fossil Plants

Plant material represents the most significant percentage of Bolton’s fossil collections.
These specimens are nearly all local, dating to between 300 and 315 million years ago.

Within the plants of the time, there were five main types; ferns, seed-ferns, horsetails, cordaites and club-mosses. Modern flowering plants and grasses didn’t evolve till much later.

Modern relatives of these plants tend to be small, but in the Carboniferous some were capable of forming huge trees up to 50 metres high.

Here you can see two seed-ferns. Above is Mariopteris and below is Pecopteris.