Tag Archives: Evolution

Role of Fruits in Evolution

Next time you bite into a slice of watermelon or a cob of corn, consider this: these familiar fruits and veggies didn’t always look and taste this way. Genetically modified foods, or GMOs, inspire strong reactions nowadays, but humans have been tweaking the genetics of our favourite produce for millennia. While GMOs may involve splicing genes from other organisms (such as bacteria) to give plants desired traits – like resistance to pests, selective breeding is a slower process whereby farmers select and grow crops with…

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Evolution of Angiosperms

Evolution of Angiosperms Undisputed fossil records place the massive appearance and diversification of angiosperms in the middle to late Mesozoic era. Angiosperms (“seed in a vessel”) produce a flower containing male and/or female reproductive structures. Fossil evidence indicates that flowering plants first appeared in the Lower Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago, and were rapidly diversifying by the Middle Cretaceous, about 100 million years ago. Earlier traces of angiosperms are scarce. Fossilized pollen recovered from Jurassic geological material has been attributed to angiosperms. A few…

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Evolution of Ferns

Leaves are lateral determinate structures formed in a predictable sequence (phyllotaxy) on the flanks of an indeterminate shoot apical meristem. The origin and evolution of leaves in vascular plants has been widely debated. Being the main conspicuous organ of nearly all vascular plants and often easy to recognize as such, it seems surprising that leaves have had multiple origins. For decades, morphologists, anatomists, paleobotanists, and systematists have contributed data to this debate. More recently, molecular genetic studies have provided insight into leaf evolution and development…

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Evolution of Plants

The evolution of plants had already started 475 million years ago. The ancestor was actually a freshwater green alga called charophyte, which at first evolved to non-vascular plants (liverworts, hornworts and mosses) and then seedless vascular plants (ferns). It was not until 360 million years ago that seed plants, including non-flowering plants (gymnosperms) and flowering plants (angiosperms), emerged on Earth. References: 1. https://www.doterra.com/US/en/botany-living-organism-plant-evolution 2. https://antranik.org/the-evolution-of-plants/

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