Ancient forest rises from italian clay
workers were digging for clay to supply a tile factory in italy's umbria region
when they struck wood-old tree trunks, in fact. upright but listing like pisa's tower,
they looked, felt, and even smelled like living trees.
but these relatives of modern sequoias and bald cypresses are about two million
years old. buried by an ancient earthquake, they were preserved by the moist clay.
sixty trees, some of them five feet in diameter and 26 feet high, have been exposed
on a 25-acre site near perugia; the tops of three dozen more break the surface. no
sequoias, nor anything resembling them in the family called taxodiaceae, live in italy
today, suggesting that the climate used to be far damper.
exposure to air has led to some decay of the trees. "the primary object is to
find some way to preserve them," says the site director, sergio vergoni of umbria's
archeological superintendency. his team has erected roofs over the trunks to provide
protection from the elements and is monitoring their status.
analysis of the trees revealed that some lived for a thousand years. “they are
not petrified,” vergoni says, “they are wood; they still could be burned.”
biography
nonfiction
allegory