Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Psilotum is a genus of fern-like vascular plants.It is one of two genera in the family Psilotaceae commonly known as whisk ferns, the other being Tmesipteris.Plants in these two genera were once thought to be descended from the earliest surviving vascular plants, but more recent phylogenies place them as basal ferns, as a sister group to Ophioglossales.
Equisetum (/ ˌ ɛ k w ɪ ˈ s iː t əm /; horsetail) is the only living genus in Equisetaceae, a family of vascular plants that reproduce by spores rather than seeds. [2]Equisetum is a "living fossil", the only living genus of the entire subclass Equisetidae, which for over 100 million years was much more diverse and dominated the understorey of late Paleozoic forests.
In the only extant genus Equisetum, these are small leaves (microphylls) with a singular vascular trace, fused into a sheath at each stem node. However, the leaves of Equisetum probably arose by the reduction of megaphylls , as evidenced by early fossil forms such as Sphenophyllum , in which the leaves are broad with branching veins.
However, genetic analysis has shown Psilotum to be a reduced fern. [6] It is not clear whether leaf gaps are a homologous trait of megaphyllous organisms or have evolved more than once. [1] While the simple definitions (microphylls: one vein, macrophylls: more than one) can still be used in modern botany, the evolutionary history is harder to ...
Psilotum has been interpreted as producing sporangia (fused in a synangium) on the terminus of a stem. Equisetum always produce strobili, but the structures bearing sporangia (sporangiophores) have been interpreted as modified stems. The sporangia, despite being recurved are interpreted as terminal.
Equisetites is a "wastebin taxon" uniting all sorts of large horsetails from the Mesozoic; it is almost certainly paraphyletic and would probably warrant being subsumed in Equisetum. But while some of the species placed there are likely to be ancestral to the modern horsetails, there have been reports of secondary growth in other Equisetites ...
Equisetites is an extinct genus of vascular plants within Equisetaceae, a family of vascular plants that reproduce by spores rather than seeds. [22] The genus was named by Sternberg (1833) [1] and contains at least 40 named species and two unnamed species, [23] with the earliest known species being E. hemingwayi from the Westphalian of Yorkshire, England, though the affinity of this genus to ...
The family contains two genera, Psilotum and Tmesipteris. The first genus, Psilotum , consists of small shrubby plants of the dry tropics commonly known as "whisk ferns". The other genus, Tmesipteris , is an epiphyte found in Australia , New Zealand , and New Caledonia .