Vegetation

The earliest fossils clearly assignable to 'plants' are fossil green algae from the Cambrian. However, the real first land plants are from the silurian (about 420 million years ago). The fossil plants in our shop are from the Francis Creek Shale near the Mazon River (or Mazon Creek), a tributary of the Illinois River near Morris, Grundy County, Illinois. The paleoecosystem in which the fossil plants used to live is believed to be a large river delta system, deposited by at least one major river system flowing from the northeast. The sediments are believed to derive from the Appalachian orogeny events. The delta had a tropical climate, a result of the area being within 10° north latitude of the equator during the Pennsylvanian. Other plants in our shop are from Poland and between 313 and 304 Ma year old.