Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht

Horsetails

The huge horsetails from the Carboniferous such as Calamites could reproduce extremely rapidly in the tropical swamps. Like the modern, but much smaller horsetails, they formed underground stems, or rhizomes, which extended horizontally and from which a large number of erect stems grew. These erect stems reached lengths of up to 10 metres and carried whorls of side branches. A Calamites forest was probably just as impenetrable as a modern bamboo forest.

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