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The simple carbon sugars photosynthesis produces are then used to form other organic compounds, such as the building material cellulose, the precursors for lipid and amino acid biosynthesis, or as a fuel in cellular respiration. The latter occurs not only in plants but also in animals when the carbon and energy from plants is passed through a ...
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 ...
The abiogenic petroleum origin hypothesis proposes that most of earth's petroleum and natural gas deposits were formed inorganically, commonly known as abiotic oil. [1] Scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports a biogenic origin for most of the world's petroleum deposits. [2] [3] Mainstream theories about the formation of hydrocarbons on ...
A fossil fuel[ a] is a carbon compound - or hydrocarbon -containing material such as coal, oil, and natural gas, [ 2] formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the remains of prehistoric organisms (animals, plants and planktons ), a process that occurs within geological formations. Reservoirs of such compound mixtures can be extracted and ...
Charcoal, a pure form of carbon made by pyrolysis of wood, has a long history as a metal-smelting fuel, as a filter material and adsorbent and as an artist's material and is one of the three ingredients of gunpowder. Cellulose, the world's most abundant organic polymer, [97] can be converted into energy, fuels, materials and chemical feedstock.
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 ...
Biomass is a term used in several contexts: in the context of ecology it means living organisms, [ 1] and in the context of bioenergy it means matter from recently living (but now dead) organisms. In the latter context, there are variations in how biomass is defined, e.g. only from plants, [ 2] from plants and algae, [ 3] from plants and ...
Carbon cycle. The carbon cycle is that part of the biogeochemical cycle by which carbon is exchanged among the biosphere, pedosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere of Earth. Other major biogeochemical cycles include the nitrogen cycle and the water cycle. Carbon is the main component of biological compounds as well as a major component ...