The Rhynie Chert is a Lower Devonian sedimentary deposit near the village of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, formed when silica rich water from a hot spring system rapidly entombed an early land ecosystem in fine grained chert, preserving plants, fungi and arthropods in exceptional three dimensional cellular detail roughly four hundred million years old. It is one of the most important sources anywhere for understanding the earliest land plants and the animals that lived among them, including some of the oldest known relatives of insects.
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