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Land plants evolved from a group of freshwater green algae, perhaps as early as 850 mya, [3] but algae-like plants might have evolved as early as 1 billion years ago. [2] The closest living relatives of land plants are the charophytes, specifically Charales; if modern Charales are similar to the distant ancestors they share with land plants, this means that the land plants evolved from a ...
The identification of plant fossils in Cambrian strata is an uncertain area in the evolutionary history of plants because of the small and soft-bodied nature of these plants. It is also difficult in a fossil of this age to distinguish among various similar appearing groups with simple branching patterns, and not all of these groups are plants.
The fossil history of flowering plants records the development of flowers and other distinctive structures of the angiosperms, now the dominant group of plants on land.The history is controversial as flowering plants appear in great diversity in the Cretaceous, with scanty and debatable records before that, creating a puzzle for evolutionary biologists that Charles Darwin named an "abominable ...
Insects roamed the land and would soon take to the skies; sharks swam the oceans as top predators, [83] and vegetation covered the land, with seed-bearing plants and forests soon to flourish. Four-limbed tetrapods gradually gain adaptations which will help them occupy a terrestrial life-habit. 360 Ma First crabs and ferns.
Between 510 and 630 million years ago, however, land plants emerged within the green algae. [41] Molecular phylogenetic studies conclude that bryophytes are the earliest diverging lineages of the extant land plants. [21] [2] [42] [43] They provide insights into the migration of plants from aquatic environments to land. A number of physical ...
The streptophyte algae (i.e. excluding the land plants) have around 122 genera; they adapted to fresh water very early in their evolutionary history and have not spread back into marine environments. [citation needed] Some time during the Ordovician, streptophytes invaded the land and began the evolution of the embryophyte land plants. [28]
Plant evolution is the subset of evolutionary phenomena that concern plants. Evolutionary phenomena are characteristics of populations that are described by averages , medians , distributions , and other statistical methods.
Green plants, also known as Viridiplantae, Viridiphyta, Chlorobionta or Chloroplastida: Plantae sensu stricto: Some unicellular, some multicellular Plants in a strict sense include the green algae, and land plants that emerged within them, including stoneworts. The relationships between plant groups are still being worked out, and the names ...