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The work that I am working on, and some other people are working on
is looking at the effects plants had on the evolution of rivers.
So in the Cambrian, before the evolution of plants most rivers were just
big sheets of sand washing across the Earth’s surface. By the Devonian,
by the time you’ve got the first forests, rivers had become more complex
and you are getting more meandering systems that are snaking their way down.
And by the Pennsylvanian when the Tynemouth Creek Formation was deposited,
this is when we start seeing truly modern river systems.
So the work we have been doing out at Tynemouth Creek has been
looking at how large plants such as Calamites and so on, may have
colonized riversides and affected the flow of rivers, and at the same time
engineered those rivers to allow the colonization of alluvial habitats
by other plants and organisms.