The Falkland Islands were once home to a rainforest that researchers described as “lush and diverse”.
The rainforest covered the islands up to 30 million years ago, experts from the University of Southampton said.
Dr Zoe Thomas, from the university, discovered that the islands on the archipelago, now mostly dominated by a treeless landscape, had cool, wet woodland.
These conditions are similar to other rainforests seen on the South American continent.
Dr Thomas and her team carried out the research after finding clues about the location of buried remains of the ancient forest.
People she spoke to in Port Stanley, the capital of the Falklands, led them to a building site in early 2020.
Dr Thomas explained: “We were in the Falklands carrying out research for a different project when a fellow researcher, based on the island, mentioned they’d heard from a friend that something interesting had been dug up by a builder they knew.
“Excavators at the site of a new care home in Stanley had cut into a deep peat layer which was filled with large tree trunks and branches.
“These were so well preserved, they looked like they’d been buried the day before, but they were in fact extremely old.
“Our interest was immediately piqued, as finding tree remains here was baffling.
“For at least thousands, probably millions of years, the Falkland Islands have not been able to sustain trees.
“It’s too windy and the soil too acidic. This raised the intriguing question of just how old the wood from this forest bed was?”
The South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute in Port Stanley helped gather samples of deposits from the site, which were then sent to the University of New South Wales in Australia for analysis.
Researchers could tell the tree samples were at least 15 million to 30 million years old because they were too old to obtain conclusive results from radiocarbon dating.
Dr Thomas added that the climate in the Falklands would have been warmer and wetter than it is today, resulting in the huge rainforest there.
Many of the tree species that grew there would now be extinct.
The change in climate to cooler and drier conditions was what likely caused the rainforest to die out.
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