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Cycads were also common, as were ginkgos and tree ferns in the forest. Smaller ferns were probably the dominant undergrowth. Caytoniaceous seed ferns were another group of important plants during this time and are thought to have been shrub to small-tree sized. [16] Ginkgo-like plants were particularly common in the mid- to high northern latitudes.
The earliest megafossils of land plants were thalloid organisms, which dwelt in fluvial wetlands and are found to have covered most of an early Silurian flood plain. They could only survive when the land was waterlogged. [22] There were also microbial mats. [23] Once plants had reached the land, there were two approaches to dealing with ...
Botany ( Greek Βοτάνη - grass, fodder; Medieval Latin botanicus – herb, plant) [2] and zoology are, historically, the core disciplines of biology whose history is closely associated with the natural sciences chemistry, physics and geology. A distinction can be made between botanical science in a pure sense, as the study of plants ...
The earliest cultivated plant in North America is the bottle gourd, remains of which have been excavated at Little Salt Spring, Florida dating to 8000 BCE. Squash (Cucurbita pepo var. ozarkana) is considered to be one of the first domesticated plants in the Eastern Woodlands, having been found in the region about 5000 BCE, though possibly not domesticated in the region until about 1000 BCE.
In 1988, the Israeli botanist Daniel Zohary and the German botanist Maria Hopf formulated their founder crops hypothesis. They proposed that eight plant species were domesticated by early Neolithic farming communities in Southwest Asia (Fertile Crescent) and went on to form the basis of agricultural economies across much of Eurasia, including Southwest Asia, South Asia, Europe, and North ...
Other primitive toothed birds were found by Othniel Marsh in Kansas in 1872. Marsh also discovered fossils of several primitive horses in the Western United States that helped trace the evolution of the horse from the small 5-toed Hyracotherium of the Eocene to the much larger single-toed modern horses of the genus Equus .
Green algae were common in the Late Cambrian (perhaps earlier) and in the Ordovician. Terrestrial plants probably evolved from green algae, first appearing as tiny non-vascular forms resembling liverworts, in the middle to late Ordovician. [92] Fossil spores found in Ordovician sedimentary rock are typical of bryophytes. [93]
The Cretaceous ( IPA: / krɪˈteɪʃəs / krih-TAY-shəss) [ 2] is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of the entire Phanerozoic. The name is derived from the ...