How do we know what the trees looked like? I thought they got buried and crumbled into carbon or something
There are a lot of fossilized records. You can see various examples of whole trunks or roots here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigillaria?wprov=sfla1
Trees and plants fossilize well, particularly due to celluose, and lignin.
Plant fossils before lignin are more problematic. But once you've got lignin, which is really when we started getting trees, the conditions for fossilization become much broader. Maybe a big storm happened and a huge amount of sediment buried a forest. Well now the process of mineralization can begin. It's not especially special conditions required to make plant fossils.
Some plant fossils are of such high quality we can still make out cellular structure. But again, this is because of lignin and cellulose in the cell wall.
I think maybe these ones have survived until today.
Sigillaria is my favorite
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