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Thigmomorphogenesis (from Ancient Greek θιγγάνω (thingánō) to touch, μορφή (morphê) shape, and γένεσις (génesis) creation) the phenomenon by which plants alter their growth and development in response to mechanical stimuli, exemplifies their remarkable adaptability to fluctuating environmental conditions.
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 ...
Most of these plants have true roots and leaves, and many were quite tall. The tree-like Archaeopteris, ancestral to the gymnosperms, and the giant cladoxylopsid trees had true wood. These are the oldest known trees of the world's first forests. Prototaxites was the fruiting body of an enormous fungus that stood more than 8 meters tall. By the ...
Polyploidy is pervasive in plants and some estimates suggest that 30–80% of living plant species are polyploid, and many lineages show evidence of ancient polyploidy (paleopolyploidy) in their genomes. [8] [9] [10] Huge explosions in angiosperm species diversity appear to have coincided with ancient genome duplications shared by many species.
Oftentimes, scavenger communities differ in consistency due to carcass size and carcass types, as well as by seasonal effects as consequence of differing invertebrate and microbial activity. [4] Competition for carrion results in the inclusion or exclusion of certain scavengers from access to carrion, shaping the scavenger community.
Theophrastus's Enquiry into Plants or Historia Plantarum (Ancient Greek: Περὶ φυτῶν ἱστορία, Peri phyton historia) was, along with his mentor Aristotle's History of Animals, Pliny the Elder's Natural History and Dioscorides's De materia medica, one of the most important books of natural history written in ancient times, and like them it was influential in the Renaissance.
These first plant books, known as herbals showed that botany was still a part of medicine, as it had been for most of ancient history. [36] Authors of herbals were often curators of university gardens, [ 39 ] and most herbals were derivative compilations of classic texts, especially De Materia Medica .
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 ...