Land plants may have evolved much earlier than we thought
▻https://news.mongabay.com/2018/02/land-plants-may-have-appeared-80-million-years-earlier-than-we-though
While previous estimates relied on limited fossil evidence to gauge when plants made the jump to land, researchers from the University of Bristol used “molecular clock” methods to analyze the genetic differences between living plant lineages. They then translated these differences to ages by comparing them to dated fossils to establish an evolutionary timeline for land plants as a group.
Their results were published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Instead of emerging 420 million years ago – the age of the oldest known fossil land plants – the study indicates land plants first appeared around 500 million years ago.
The timescale of early land plant evolution
▻http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/02/13/1719588115
#plantes #colonisation_terrestre #archéologie