Researchers with the participation of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin have described a new plant taxon from the Chemnitz Fossil Forest. The huge, 291-million-year-old seed fern will be studied further in the coming years. The aim is to explore the diversity of plants in the early Permian forests and their role in the increasingly extreme ecosystems of this time. The results will contribute to a better understanding of the interactions between vegetation and climate in the late Paleozoic, a time at the end of a major glaciation phase on our planet roughly comparable to our climatic situation today.