How the earliest plants made our world muddy

The first plants to make it on to land altered mud production and where it formed rocks, changing our planet foreverHow and when the earliest plants made the first move on to land is always a hot topic for palaeobotanists. We know that early land plants likely evolved from freshwater algae, gaining a bunch of necessary adaptations in the process. Plants needed to support themselves, protect themselves from drying out and from the harmful effects of UV light, and gain water and nutrients from a finite supply on land. Astudy published last week by Mariusz Salamon and colleagues described fossils that push back the earliest evidence of land plants to around 445 million years ago.The new fossils come from mudstones in central Poland, in beds that have been dated using other, much more common and cosmopolitan, fossils. The plant remains are tiny, branched fragments, up to about 3mm long. Some specimens appear to have spore-cases at the top of their branches, similar to those seen in younger, better-known early land plants such asCooksonia.The preservation of the plants means details are hard to discern, but Salamon and colleagues present a single, tantalising stoma, or air pore, on one of the fragments as a key piece of evidence. If this plant had stomata for gas exchange, it was likely to have been living in land, a good 15 million years earlier than previously known plant fragments.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Science Fossils Evolution Geology Plants Source Type: news