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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 ...
A significant contribution to English natural history was made by parson-naturalists such as Gilbert White, William Kirby, John George Wood, and John Ray, who wrote about plants, animals, and other aspects of nature. Many of these men wrote about nature to make the natural theology argument for the existence or goodness of God. [23]
The dominant tree groups today are all seed plants, the gymnosperms, which include the coniferous trees, and the angiosperms, which contain all fruiting and flowering trees. No free-sporing trees like Archaeopteris exist in the extant flora. It was long thought that the angiosperms arose from within the gymnosperms, but recent molecular ...
Trees play a significant role in reducing erosion and moderating the climate. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store large quantities of carbon in their tissues. Trees and forests provide a habitat for many species of animals and plants. Tropical rainforests are among the most biodiverse habitats in the world.
Botany, also called plant science or phytology, is the branch of natural science and biology studying plants, especially their anatomy, taxonomy, and ecology. [1] A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field.
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
The Free Library has a separate homepage. It is a free reference website that offers full-text versions of classic literary works by hundreds of authors. It is also a news aggregator, offering articles from a large collection of periodicals containing over four million articles dating back to 1984. Newly published articles are added to the site ...
The resilience of human food systems and their capacity to adapt to future change is linked to biodiversity – including dryland-adapted shrub and tree species that help combat desertification, forest-dwelling insects, bats and bird species that pollinate crops, trees with extensive root systems in mountain ecosystems that prevent soil erosion ...