You can download Plant Fossils The History of Land Vegetation ebook here.
- Title: Plant Fossils The History of Land Vegetation
- Author: Cleal, Christopher J.; Thomas, Barry A.
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd.
- Year: 224
Without plants, life on Earth, as we know it, would not exist. Plants have played a central role in the evolution of life and the colonisation of land. And yet the fossil history of plants is not well known, even to many scientists, beyond a general knowledge that coal is formed of fossil plant material. The evolution of the Earth’s flora has had its vicissitudes just as much as that of the fauna. New groups of plants have come and gone, there have been radiations and extinctions.
Overall there has been a major change in the domination of plant life from the evolution of rudimentary vascular plants some 400 million years ago. These first land plants were tiny leafless stems which only grew upright for a few centimeters and were restricted to lowlying waterlogged habitats. Cleal and Thomas tell the remarkable story of how, from these unpromising beginnings, the whole of Earth’s flora has evolved. Each of the major groups of plants is described in general order of appearance in the record.
The history develops through the first giant club-mosses, horsetails and ferns, which contributed so much to the first forests on Earth and the economically famous coal deposits of Carboniferous times. By the time the dinosaurs took over, in the Mesozoic Era, landscapes were dominated by coniferophytes and pteridophytes. In turn these were displaced as the angiosperms and large plant eating mammals finally burst into dominance in the Tertiary some 60 million years ago.
‘Plant Fossils’ tells this remarkable 400 million year history of land vegetation and its photographically illustrates it with a generous selection of fossil plant portraits. Most of these photographs of fossil plants have never been seen before, outside of academic journals and represent an international sample of the plant record. The authors also tell of the scientists who have contributed to the development of this story and hazard some predictions about the directions which future research may take.