HOW THE FIRST FORESTS NEARLY KILLED THE OCEANS 372 MILLION YEARS AGO

Around 372 million years ago, the first forests spread across the land, and the oceans began to suffocate. Earth's biggest reefs collapsed and the armored giants of the sea disappeared, and the main suspect isn't an asteroid or a volcano. It's trees. This is the story of the Devonian extinctions, told through the eyes of Dunkleosteus, a 3.5-meter armored fish with self-sharpening bone blades instead of teeth. Its fossil skulls come out of a cliff in Cleveland, Ohio, in a layer of rock as black as soot, and nothing in that ancient sea ever touched its body. Why is the stone black? Stay to the end for the answer. You'll walk through the first forests on Earth: the stone stumps of Gilboa, which stayed a puzzle for more than 100 years, and Archaeopteris, often called the earliest modern tree. In a quarry near Cairo, New York, its fossil roots stretch more than 11 meters across a 386-million-year-old forest floor. Then we follow what those roots set loose, from the land, down the rivers and into the sea. In the sea, a reef belt ran about 5,000 kilometers, more than twice the length of today's Great Barrier Reef. You'll see the two thin black stripes in a stream in Germany's Harz Mountains where that reef world ends. We'll look at the evidence from ancient lakes in Scotland and Greenland, and at a second suspect from deep under Siberia. And we'll be honest about what science has proven and what it's still arguing about. The final blow comes with ice: glaciers in Brazil and Bolivia, the Hangenberg event around 359 million years ago, and the end of the armored fish. And one strange survivor with 8 fingers on one foot crawls out of that suffocating water. 00:00 A sea monster in black stone 06:34 The first forests rise in New York 12:49 How a tree can poison a sea 19:04 The biggest reefs Earth ever built 25:00 The reefs collapse, and a second suspect 30:56 Dunkleosteus, king above a dead seafloor 36:34 Ice and the end of the armored fish 41:45 The survivors and the answer in the black stone #Devonian #MassExtinction #Dunkleosteus