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This rapid appearance of so many plant groups and growth forms has been called the "Devonian Explosion". The primitive arthropods co-evolved with this diversified terrestrial vegetation structure. The evolving co-dependence of insects and seed-plants that characterizes a recognizably modern world had its genesis in the late Devonian.
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 ...
Plant evolution is the subset of evolutionary phenomena that concern plants. ... plants and animals pass through a phylotypic stage that evolved independently [3] ...
They were photosynthetic and multicellular, indicating that plants evolved much earlier than originally thought. [53] 750 Ma Beginning of animal evolution. [54] [55] 720–630 Ma Possible global glaciation [56] [57] which increased the atmospheric oxygen and decreased carbon dioxide, and was either caused by land plant evolution [58] or ...
The latest major group of plants to evolve were the grasses, which became important in the mid Tertiary, from around . The grasses, as well as many other groups, evolved new mechanisms of metabolism to survive the low CO 2 and warm, dry conditions of the tropics over the last .
A second mechanism, CAM photosynthesis, is a carbon fixation pathway that evolved in some plants as an adaptation to arid conditions. [29] [30] The most important benefit of CAM to the plant is the ability to leave most leaf stomata closed during the day. [31] This reduces water loss due to evapotranspiration.
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 ...
Up to the 17th century, botany and medicine were one and the same but those books emphasising medicinal aspects eventually omitted the plant lore to become modern pharmacopoeias; those that omitted the medicine became more botanical and evolved into the modern compilations of plant descriptions we call Floras.