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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 end of the Devonian, the first seed-forming plants had appeared. This rapid appearance of so many plant groups and growth forms has been called the "Devonian Explosion".
The fungi were of the phylum Glomeromycota, [39] a group that probably first appeared 1 billion years ago and still forms arbuscular mycorrhizal associations today with all major land plant groups from bryophytes to pteridophytes, gymnosperms and angiosperms and with more than 80% of vascular plants.
Seed plants, which first appeared in the fossil record towards the end of the Paleozoic era, reproduce using desiccation-resistant capsules called seeds. Starting from a plant which disperses by spores, highly complex changes are needed to produce seeds. The sporophyte has two kinds of spore-forming organs or sporangia.
Bryophytes (/ ˈ b r aɪ. ə ˌ f aɪ t s /) [1] are a group of land plants (embryophytes), sometimes treated as a taxonomic division, that contains three groups of non-vascular land plants: the liverworts, hornworts, and mosses. [2]
Many modern mammal groups begin to appear: first glyptodonts, ground sloths, canids, peccaries, and the first eagles and hawks. Diversity in toothed and baleen whales. 33 Ma Evolution of the thylacinid marsupials . 30 Ma First balanids and eucalypts, extinction of embrithopod and brontothere mammals, earliest pigs and cats. 28 Ma
Mosses are small, non-vascular flowerless plants in the taxonomic division Bryophyta (/ b r aɪ ˈ ɒ f ə t ə /, [3] / ˌ b r aɪ. ə ˈ f aɪ t ə /) sensu stricto.Bryophyta (sensu lato, Schimp. 1879 [4]) may also refer to the parent group bryophytes, which comprise liverworts, mosses, and hornworts. [5]
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 ...
They first appeared in the fossil record around 66 million years ago, soon after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that eliminated about three-quarters of plant and animal species on Earth, including most dinosaurs. [25] [26] One of the last Plesiadapiformes is Carpolestes simpsoni, having grasping digits but not forward-facing eyes.