Living Fossil

The first ancestors of this "living fossil" appeared in the Paleozoic Era and were particularly prevalent in the Carboniferous Period and the Pennsylvanian Epoch where thick forests of this species (rising up to 100 feet tall) covered much of what is now North America and Europe. For time reference, this was over 300,000,000 (million) years ago. The carbon laid down by millions of years of these forests became coal fields through geologic processes.

This photo was taken by a Hasselblad 500C medium format film camera and Carl Zeiss Sonnar 1:4 f=150mm T* lens attached to a Hasselblad 21mm extension tube with a Kowa L39•3C(UV) filter using Fuji 160NS film, the negative scanned by an Epson Perfection V600 and digitalized with Photoshop.