“THE OLDEST PIECE OF WOOD UPON EARTH.”
The most remarkable vegetable relic which the Lower Old Red Sandstone has given us is a small fragment of a coniferous tree of the Araucarian family, which formed one of the chief ornaments of the late Hugh Miller’s museum, and to which he used to point as the oldest piece of wood upon earth. He found it in one of the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty, and thus refers to it in his Testimony of the Rocks:
On what perished land of the early paleozoic ages did this venerably antique tree cast root and flourish, when the extinct genera Pterichthys and Coccoeteus were enjoying life by millions in the surrounding seas, long ere the flora or fauna of the coal measures had begun to be?
The same nodule which enclosed this lignite contained part of another fossil, the well-marked scales of Diplacanthus striatus, an ichthyolite restricted to the Lower Old Red Sandstone exclusively. If there be any value in paleontological evidence, this Cromarty lignite must have been deposited in a sea inhabited by the Coccoeteus and Diplacanthus. It is demonstrable that, while yet in a recent state, a Diplacanthus lay down and died beside it; and the evidence in the case is unequivocally this, that in the oldest portion of the oldest terrestrial flora yet known there occurs the fragment of a tree quite as high in the scale as the stately Norfolk-Island pine or the noble cedar of Lebanon.