The weight of the trees was so great that the ones on the bottom got squished and became coal. That’s where coal is from. Bonus fact: the whole time this was happening, sharks were hunting in the oceans. Sharks are older than trees and fungus!
Fungi in general are about twice as old as sharks. Roughly a billion years vs ~450 million years.
The point is there just weren’t any which had bacteria to decompose trees, as no bacteria had evolved the ability yet. Until there were. Took millions of years though.
Fun fact, now we have mushrooms which can deal with plastic.
Pestalotiopsis microspora is a type of endophytic fungus discovered in the Amazon rainforest in 2011 which contains bacteria that can biodegrade and break down synthetic plastic polymers.
that’s what i was thinkin… surely single-cell eukaryote (fungi) is earlier than complex eukaryote (shark)?
you’d think so, but sharks were in fact the first lifeform to be summoned from the astral planes, everything else evolved from a single shark cell that had the right mutations to survive (all sharks simply died within minutes until plants had created enough oxygen for them to breathe, at which point they died within days until the evolution of other animals)
The trees clogged the land, the water, and when one inevitably got struck by lightning, continent wide forest fires were common.
IIRC, it’s these trees, not dinosaur bones that became most of the oil/gas deposits.
It’s worth noting that when it comes to a species wrecking the environment, causing mass extinction, changing the climate, or spoiling the atmosphere, humans are not the first and we’re not the worst.
