Some people call those forests coal forests (and the period CARBONiferous) because after millions of years of flooding, silt build-up and compression, the scale forests turned into coal that big companies dig up and burn in power stations like Cockenzie near Edinburgh and Drax in Yorkshire. Coal is the product of a very specific set of climatic and ecological conditions which haven't happened since the scale forests.
We call them Scale forests because that's what they were. Scale trees were really fucking cool looking (see main picture). For the first part of their life the trunk just grows upwards, not branching out until reaching close to its final height, when the trunk splits in two and then again & again until a canopy and finally cones grew. Because for the initial part of their growth the scale tree had no branches, scaly leaves grew on its trunk, leaving the diamond shaped scale prints once those leaves had died. Scale trees are well extinct now, but a few of their relatives still exist as small underwater plants like the Quillwort who lives in freshwater lochs in he highlands and islands of Scotland. The other cool thing about the scale forests were that one of the main animals living there were 2m long scorpion-like creatures.
We like imagining building treehouses in scale trees.
