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Charred wood fragments preserved in lake sediments at Madygen, a fossil site in southwestern Kyrgyzstan, record these ancient fires.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By examining these remains, Dr. Philippe Moisan, a paleobotanist at the University of Atacama (UDA<\/a>), demonstrated that the wood had been transformed into charcoal during past wildfires.\u00a0<\/p>\n Microscopic structures within the fragments show that multiple types of cone-bearing trees burned, indicating that fire moved through a diverse forest rather than isolated patches of vegetation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because the material was transported and deposited after burning, the evidence confirms nearby wildfire activity while leaving open how often these events occurred.<\/p>\n Why charcoal counts<\/p>\n Charcoal matters in the fossil record because intense heat hardens plant tissue before it can fully rot away.<\/p>\n In a 2026 interview<\/a>, Moisan said charcoal lets scientists confirm burning and identify the wood that caught fire.<\/p>\n \u201cPaleofires are natural phenomena that occurred in the geological past,\u201d said Dr. Moisan.<\/p>\n That explanation fits Madygen well, because the surrounding rocks do not point to lava or ash flows as the source of the charring.<\/p>\n Triassic wildfire archive in Madygen<\/p>\n Few places preserve Triassic life as completely as Madygen, where plants, insects, shell-bearing animals, and vertebrates settled into river and lake sediments.<\/p>\n A 2021 study<\/a> described the beds as about 237 million years old and identified them as a Fossil Lagerst\u00e4tte, meaning a site where fossils are preserved in unusual detail.<\/p>\n \u201cMore than 25,000 fossil insect specimens have been collected at Madygen,\u201d said Moisan.<\/p>\n That richness matters here because burned wood could wash off nearby land and still be buried quickly enough to keep its fragile anatomy.<\/p>\n Every charred fragment the team studied came from gymnosperms, seed plants that include many cone-bearing trees.<\/p>\n Several wood patterns appeared in the charcoal<\/a>, so the fires likely consumed more than one kind of tree.<\/p>\n Because charring shrinks and cracks tissue, the researchers could not name every lineage, but at least three wood types came from different genera.<\/p>\n That limit keeps the claim careful, yet it still shows fire had enough fuel variety to move through a real forest community.<\/p>\n Life after collapse<\/p>\n Madygen\u2019s fires burned during a long recovery after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, Earth\u2019s worst known die-off.<\/p>\n Earlier in the Triassic, forests had thinned so badly that both coal deposits and charcoal became scarce in many places.<\/p>\n By the time the Madygen trees grew, vegetation had returned strongly enough to build fuel, carry flames, and leave blackened wood behind.<\/p>\n That sequence turns fire into a sign that land ecosystems were no longer merely surviving, they were functioning at a larger scale.<\/p>\n Mapping Triassic wildfires<\/p>\n The charcoal did not burn<\/a> where the team found it preserved in the mudstone layers.<\/p>\n Streams or runoff likely swept burned wood from drier land into the lake, where fine mud sealed it away from decay.<\/p>\n Some fragments held tiny spaces between cells, a feature sometimes seen in wet-habitat wood, but that clue cannot map the forest precisely.<\/p>\n For now, the safest picture is a basin ringed by plains and uplands, with trees growing in more than one habitat.<\/p>\n Madygen is not the first Triassic fire site, but it fills a blank spot on the world map of ancient burning.<\/p>\n A review of Triassic fire records<\/a> suggested the charcoal record is thinner than the vegetation record would predict.<\/p>\n By adding Madygen\u2019s charred wood and older fire traces from the same formation, the paper places wildfire deep inside Pangaea, the ancient supercontinent.<\/p>\n That broader spread matters because fires need both plant fuel and enough oxygen to keep burning.<\/p>\n What fire changes<\/p>\n Fire<\/a> does more than kill trees in an ecosystem still recovering from the mass extinction.<\/p>\n It opens ground, recycles nutrients, and changes which plants can return first, because ash releases minerals back into the soil.<\/p>\n In a recovering Triassic world, that would have helped shape competition among the plant groups rebuilding land ecosystems after the end-Permian crisis.<\/p>\n Such evidence makes the charcoal more than a disaster trace and shows disturbance had become part of normal ecological life again.<\/p>\n Return to Madygen<\/p>\n The site is far from exhausted, despite decades of collecting, sorting, and scientific work there.<\/p>\n After a 17-year gap forced by armed conflict, Moisan said the team plans to return to Madygen in August 2026.<\/p>\n New field seasons could tie burned wood to specific plant beds, search for more charcoal layers, and test how often the basin burned.<\/p>\n That next step matters because each new fragment can sharpen the picture of how often Triassic forests burned and what kept feeding them.<\/p>\n Lessons from Triassic wildfires<\/p>\n Across lake mud, charcoal, and a patchy global record, the Madygen fossils show fire was woven into land life 237 million years ago.<\/p>\n Future work may reveal how often those blazes struck, but one point is clear: even a well-preserved ancient ecosystem lived with smoke.<\/p>\n The study is published in Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers have documented wildfire activity 237 million years ago by identifying charred wood preserved in the fossil record.\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":415780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-415779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Examples](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/paleo-wildfires-triassic_charcoal-wood-fire-remains_Palaeobotany_1s.webp.webp\")
<\/a>Examples of mudstone samples containing the studied charcoal wood remains. (A) Mudstone sample from Locality 1. (B\u2013D) Mudstone samples from Locality 2. Credit: Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology. Click image to enlarge.Trees that burned<\/p>\n![\"Palaeogeographical](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/paleo-wildfires-triassic_distribution-map_pangaea_Mollweide_1s.webp.webp\")
<\/a>Palaeogeographical distribution of published palaeo-wildfire Triassic records for the Ladinian\u2013Carnian interval. The upper map displays Anisian\u2013Ladinian, Ladinian, and Ladinian\u2013Carnian occurrences, while the lower map illustrates Carnian and Carnian\u2013Norian ones. Credit: Mollweide projections from Scotese et al. (2024). Click image to enlarge.A patchy fire map<\/p>\n