Comment by dangrossman

After a decade there's a couple extra inches of wood and leaf matter sitting on the ground. I've always wondered what our planet looked like in the millions of years between the evolution of trees, and the evolution of the first fungus that could break down cellulose. With nowhere to go, those dead forests eventually fossilized and became coal deposits -- but what was it like to actually be there when those forests were growing. How thick did the dead wood stack up? How did anything grow after the first few generations of trees covered the ground in so much dead carbon?