A rare 3-D tree fossil may be the earliest glimpse at a forest understory

With its fluffed, spiraling top and thin trunk, the Sanfordiacaulis densifolia tree looks like it came straight out of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. But this isn’t a truffula come to life. It’s a 3-D rendering of a 350 million-year-old fossil that shows something very few other fossils in the world ever have — both a trunk and the leaves of a tree species from a somewhat fuzzy time period in plant history, researchers report February 2 in Current Biology

“When I first saw [the fossil], I was gobsmacked,” says geologist Robert Gastaldo of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. “Finding this … it made me think we should buy lottery

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