The Fossil Grove is a group of plant fossils located within Victoria Park, Glasgow, Scotland. It was discovered in 1887 and contains the fossilised stumps and roots of eleven extinct Lepidodendron trees, which are sometimes described as "giant club mosses" but are more closely related to quillworts. The Fossil Grove is managed as a museum and has been a popular tourist attraction since it opened for public viewing in 1890. The site, Glasgow's most ancient visitor attraction and the remnants of an extensive ancient forest, is viewed from within a building constructed to protect the fossils from the elements. Description The Fossil Grove is on a by floor of an old quarry, and belongs to the same geological time period as several other groups of Lepidodendron fossils found northwest of Glasgow. The shales and sandstones exposed around the fossils belong to the Limestone Coal Formation of the Clackmannan Group, with the shale containing imprints of various plant remains. The strata were deposited approximately 325 million years ago when the trees were still alive, and the strata are now folded and cut by many faults and slant downwards to the northeast. The quarry in which the fossils were found is an igneous dolerite sill that was intruded into the sediments and two of the trunks during the Early Permian period approximately 290 million years ago. The dolerite was used to macadamize nearby roads. The trees were only discovered after the quarry was abandoned when it was landscaped into the new Victoria Park. The stumps themselves are internal casts of the hollow trees, representing the huge cortical meristem of the trees rather than the woody interior. The remnants of trunks belonged to Lepidodendron veltheimianum trees and the root systems were Stigmaria ficoides. Most trunks are in diameter and tall, and a single larger stump stands in the western part of the grove, measuring in diameter. Some fossils have small wrinkles on their exterior, suggesting wrinkled bark, but fine details are poorly preserved in the fossils. The roots have the dichotomous branching pattern indicative of Stigmaria and extend over from the trunks. The trees would have grown during the Carboniferous period when Scotland was a more tropical area, situated near the equator. The trees grew in a low, swampy environment that would often flood. The distribution of the trunks suggests that the Grove was once part of a Paleozoic forest that was chiefly