Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The earliest conifers appear in the fossil record during the Late Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian), over 300 million years ago. Conifers are thought to be most closely related to the Cordaitales , a group of extinct Carboniferous-Permian trees and clambering plants whose reproductive structures had some similarities to those of conifers.
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.
Walchia is a primitive fossil conifer found in upper Pennsylvanian (Carboniferous) and lower Permian (about 310-290 Mya) rocks of Europe and North America. A forest of in-situ Walchia tree-stumps is located on the Northumberland Strait coast at Brule, Nova Scotia. Besides the Walchia forest, fallen tree trunks, and leaflet impressions, the ...
The Permian (/ ˈpɜːrmi.ən / PUR-mee-ən) [ 4 ] is a geologic period and stratigraphic system which spans 47 million years from the end of the Carboniferous Period 298.9 million years ago (Mya), to the beginning of the Triassic Period 251.902 Mya. It is the last period of the Paleozoic Era; the following Triassic Period belongs to the ...
The gymnosperms (/ ˈdʒɪmnəˌspɜːrmz, - noʊ -/ ⓘ JIM-nə-spurmz, -noh-; lit. 'revealed seeds') are a group of seed-producing plants that include conifers, cycads, Ginkgo, and gnetophytes, forming the clade Gymnospermae. The term gymnosperm comes from the composite word in Greek: γυμνόσπερμος (γυμνός, gymnos, 'naked ...
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 ...
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 ...
Voltziales is an extinct order of conifers.The group contains the ancestral lineages from which modern conifer groups emerged. Voltzialean conifers are divided into two informal groups, the primitive "walchian conifers" like Walchia, where the ovuliferous cone is composed of radial shoots and the more advanced "voltzian voltziales", also known as "transitional conifers" where the cone is ...