Gizmodo – American and Chinese scientists are flabbergasted after discovering a giant 298-million-year-old forest buried intact under a coal mine near Wuda, in Inner Mongolia, China. They are calling it the Pompeii of the Permian period because, like the ancient Roman city, it was covered and preserved by volcanic ash. Like Pompeii, this swamp forest is so perfectly maintained that scientists know where every plant originally was. This has allowed them to map it and to create the images above. This extraordinary finding “is like Pompeii”, according to University of The researchers discovered the 10,763-square-foot (1000-square-meter) area hidden under a coal mine using heavy industrial machinery. They believe that this frozen-in-time fossilized forest was covered under gigantic amounts of ash that fell from the sky for days. So far, they have identified six groups of trees, some of them 80 feet tall. Some of them are Sigillaria and Cordaites, but they also found large groups of a type called Noeggerathiales, which are now completely extinct. Pfefferkorn worked on the project with Jun Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yi Zhang of Shenyang Normal University and Zhuo Feng of Yunnan University. The results of their findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Umm call me old fashioned but if you’re going to say you discovered a 298 million year old rain forest you better have pictures of it.  Not some cartoon drawings either. I’m talking the real fucking deal.  Videos and shit too. And while we’re at it am I the only one that finds it strange the Scientist who discovered this last name is Pfefferkorn? Sounds like somebody watched a little too much Sandlot back in the day.   Not to mention the fact that if this was real wouldn’t this be the biggest story in the history of I don’t know earth?   So I don’t want to tell Gizmodo how to do their business but I’m not 100, I’m not 200, I’m 5,000% sure this billion year old rain forest doesn’t exist.