A forest before dinosaurs
The coal seams of the Satpura Gondwana Basin preserve an entire ecosystem from the Early Permian Period, around 290 million years ago. At this time, the Indian subcontinent was part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, and it was situated much closer to the South Pole. The landscape consisted of vast, cool, swampy lowlands and river valleys. These wetlands supported dense forests of plants unlike anything alive today.
The most spectacular of these were the giant arborescent lycophytes, or clubmoss trees. The genus Lepidodendron sometimes grew to heights of 50 meters, with trunks over a meter in diameter at the base. These were not trees. they lacked wood and instead had soft, pulpy interiors supported by a thick, bark-like cortex. Their trunks were covered in a diamond-shaped pattern of leaf scars, earning them the name "scale trees". They grew in dense stands, reproducing via spores released from cone-like structures, and may have had a rapid life cycle of only 10 to 15 years.
The flora of Gondwana
While giant clubmosses were a feature of Paleozoic coal forests, the most abundant fossils found within the Satpura region belong to a group of seed ferns known as the Glossopteris flora. Glossopteris is the defining plant of the Permian period in Gondwana. It was a woody, seed-bearing plant with large, tongue-shaped leaves. Its name comes from the Greek glossa (tongue) and pteris (fern). Alongside Glossopteris, the fossil record shows related plants like Gangamopteris and towering, bamboo-like horsetails such as Schizoneura.
The coal itself is the compressed and heated remains of these ancient forests. The swampy, low-oxygen environment prevented dead plant matter from decaying completely. At the time, fungi and bacteria capable of breaking down lignin—the tough compound in plant cell walls—had not yet evolved. This allowed immense layers of peat to accumulate. Over millions of years, burial under accumulating sediments provided the heat and pressure to transform the peat into the bituminous coal seams of the Barakar Formation, which are excavated today in the Pench-Kanhan and Tawa Valley coalfields.