The forest primeval

New from the "I Thought I'd Heard Everything" department, we have: a warning that you should look out for a specific kind of tree, because if you see one, you have slipped through a portal in space-time.

The tree is a Lepidodendron, and the good thing about it is at least it's pretty distinctive-looking:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tim Bertelink, Lepidodendron, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So it's unlikely you'd mistake it for anything else.  Here's one account (of many) that have shown up all over social media, especially Reddit and TikTok:

I was on a hike in central Pennsylvania with some friends, and went off from the others to explore.  I grew up not far from there and know the area pretty well, but after about a half-hour things started looking weird.  The area is kind of rocky and hilly, but the path I was on kept heading down, and soon I was in a swampy terrain I'd never seen before.  I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid and I know the kind of trees that grow there, and I'd never seen ones like this.  Tall and skinny, kind of like a stretched-out pine tree, but the bark was weird, with a pattern like the scales of a fish.  There were other plants, too, but I didn't recognize a single one.  Something about the place "felt wrong," like I'd stumbled into somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.  By this time I was completely freaked out.  I tried to retrace my steps, but the undergrowth was really thick with these strange-looking plants of all kinds.  Eventually I found my way to drier ground, and pretty soon found the path again.  Now all around me I saw maples and oaks and hickories, just ordinary trees, and the weird out-of-place feeling disappeared.  After another fifteen minutes of walking I found my friends again, and everything turned out okay, but to this day I can't let go of the feeling that I had a narrow escape from being lost forever.

The guy said he looked for pics online of "weird skinny trees like pine trees" and eventually found one that was an exact match to what he'd seen.

You guessed it.  The Lepidodendron.

The problem with all this is that the Lepidodendron has been extinct for over 250 million years.

They had their heyday in the Carboniferous Period, and in fact are only (very) distantly related to pines; the extant plants most closely related to the Lepidodendron are club mosses, most commonly found in the understory of deep, undisturbed forests.  And at least the unnamed storyteller got the place and climate right; a lot of rocks in Pennsylvania are of Carboniferous age, and it was in general a hot, humid, rainy period of Earth's history.

The thing is, though, if the people who say they've seen Lepidodendrons actually have wandered through a fold in the space-time continuum and found themselves back in the Carboniferous Period, it wouldn't be apparent only because they'd see strange scaly trees and be calf-deep in mud.  If you were suddenly transported to the mid-Carboniferous, (1) it would be absolutely unambiguous, and (2) you'd be damn lucky to last fifteen minutes.  The temperatures were an average of ten degrees Celsius warmer than they are today, with oxygen levels at around 30% (as compared to today's 21%).  The higher oxygen favored the evolution toward larger size in animals that are limited by the efficiency of their respiratory system -- most notably arthropods.  In those same swamps where you'd find Lepidodendron trees, you'd find the dragonfly Meganeura, with a 75-centimeter wingspan; the 2.6-meter-long millipede Arthropleura; and the 70-centimeter-long scorpion Pulmonoscorpius.  If that's not bad enough, you'd have to avoid being eaten by the three-meter-long, sixty-kilogram predatory reptile Sphenacodon, which came equipped with a long row of big, nasty, pointy teeth.

Sphenacodon ferox skull in the Field Museum of Chicago [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smokeybjb, Sphenacodon ferox 1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So as interesting as it is, the Carboniferous Period is not a place you'd want to go in your time machine.

Anyhow, I got curious about why all of a sudden people are seeing an obscure genus of extinct trees in downtown Harrisburg or wherever, so I did some digging.  After wading through a bunch of accounts of the "YES I SAW ONE OMG I WAS IN ANOTHER DIMENSION AND IT WAS SOOOO SCARY" type, I found out that the whole thing started three years ago when someone posted the following on Reddit:

You should know two things about this, though; (1) the person who posted this originally is an actual paleontologist, and (2) for fuck's sake, he meant it as a joke.  It didn't get much traction beyond a few har-de-hars from people who were fossil enthusiasts until fall of last year, when a TikToker with the handle @jese2063 posted images of spooky trees that look vaguely like Lepidodendrons, with an equally creepy-sounding soundtrack and scary text about how if you see one, you've gone back in time and are in horrific danger.  (It's hard to tell whether he believed it himself; my sense is not, but I have an unfortunate habit of giving people the benefit of the doubt when they don't deserve it.)

In any case, that opened the floodgates.  @jese2063's video got over 4.5 million views, and now there are hundreds of similar claims, many of them from people like the Pennsylvanian hiker who said they'd actually visited the Carboniferous Period and lived to tell the tale.

The problem is, like with @jese2063, it's difficult to discern how many of these are true believers, and how many are simply adding their contributions to a growing Carboniferous creepypasta.  I have nothing against scary fiction -- after all, I've written my fair share of it -- but you have to wonder if some of these people are deadly serious.

I mean, the benefit of the doubt only goes so far.

In any case, that's the latest frightening thing to look out for.  If you're ever in, say, Scotland, and suddenly you find yourself in a hot fern-filled rainforest, now you'll be prepared.  Can't honestly tell you what to do about it, however.  Just enjoy looking around for fifteen minutes until you're eaten by a Sphenacodon or attacked by enormous millipedes, I guess.

****************************************