Researchers Probe Fossilized Rain Forest

In this photo released Monday, April 23, 2007 by the Illinois State Geological Survey shows a fossil, part of a fossilized rain forest discovered in coal mines in Vermilion County in east central Illinois. Geologists say the area dates to the Pennsylvania Age, 300 million years ago. Researchers are probing the fossilized area which covers about 15 square miles, all more than 200 feet below ground, and is probably the largest intact rain forest from that period ever studied. (AP Photo/Illinois State Geological Survey) (AP)

People who live in eastern Illinois may occasionally long for a few more trees, but they'd find the land that now sits just above the miners' heads a tough place to call home during the Pennsylvania Age, Elrick said.

Today's Illinoisan likely would recognize it right away as a jungle, he said. The plants were bigger _ 30-foot-tall horsetails and mosses as big as trees _ but familiar enough.

The heat and humidity would be something else entirely.

"It would be hot, extremely humid, really uncomfortable to be standing around there," Elrick said. "Something out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Lost World.'"

Researchers haven't found much evidence of animal life, but they have found a eurypterid, a 6-foot-long lobster-like creature that would have crawled from beneath the waves of the long-gone Absoroka Sea, Falcon-Lang and Elrick said.

Derrel Carter, a spokesman for Peabody Energy, said mining has stopped at the Riola mine but continues at the Vermilion Grove site.

Elrick and the other researchers plan to continue documenting what's above the Vermilion County mines, drawing and taking pictures and notes. But that's all they'll do, he said.

The area deep underground isn't suitable for preservation.

"Unfortunately, it will never be a visitable museum kind of piece," Elrick said. "We try to document to the best of our ability what we see, and take notes ... It's sort of like asking people to go to New York City and describe every store front in a day."

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Associated Press Writer Jim Suhr contributed to this report.