Pertica
Pertica is a genus of extinct vascular plants of the Early to Middle Devonian. It has been placed in the "trimerophytes", a paraphyletic group of early members of the lineage leading to modern ferns and seed plants. Pertica quadrifaria was described in 1972 from compression fossils found in the Trout Valley Formation of northern Maine, USA, it was an upright plant which grew to as much as a metre in height. It comprised a main, straight stem with side branches which developed dichotomously, branching many times at shorter intervals; some of the terminal branchlets bore masses of erect paired, ellipsoidal sporangia in distinctive tight clusters. The branches were arranged in a spiral pattern; the specific epithet quadrifaria refers to this growth habit. Pertica varia was described in 1976 from the Devonian of Eastern Canada, it was taller than P. quadrifaria, reaching a height of nearly 3 m. The sporangia were similar to those of P. quadrifaria. Pertica dalhousii was described in 1978 from fossils of Early or Middle Devonian age found in New Brunswick, Canada.
The plant appears to have been similar to P. quadrifaria, comprising a central stem with spirally arranged dichotomous side branches, some of which terminated in erect clusters of between 32 and 128 sporangia. Further specimens from the same rocks belonged to another species of Pertica, but were not sufficiently well preserved to be named; the clear differentiation between a main stem and lateral branches in Pertica, as in other "trimerophytes", has been considered to represent an early stage in the development of a growth pattern that led to the evolution of megaphylls. Consistent with this, a cladogram published in 2004 by Crane et al. places Pertica in a paraphyletic stem group basal to the seed plants which have such leaves. Other researchers have produced rather different analyses. Rothwell's analysis separates "trimerophytes", like Pertica, from progymnosperms, like Tetraxylopteris, with only the latter being related to seed plants
Heterospory
Heterospory is the production of spores of two different sizes and sexes by the sporophytes of land plants. The smaller of these, the microspore, is male and the larger megaspore is female. Heterospory evolved during the Devonian period from isospory independently in several plant groups: the clubmosses, the arborescent horsetails, progymnosperms; this occurred as part of the process of evolution of the timing of sex differentiation. Heterospory developed due to natural selection pressures that encouraged an increase in propagule size; this may first have led to an increase in spore size and resulted in the species producing larger megaspores as well as smaller microspores. Heterospory evolved from homospory many times, but the species in which it first appeared are now extinct. Heterosporic plants that produce seeds are their most widespread descendants. Seed plants constitute the largest subsection of heterosporic plants. Microspores are haploid spores that in endosporic species contain the male gametophyte, carried to the megaspores by wind, water currents or animal vectors.
Microspores are nearly all nonflagellated, are therefore not capable of active movement. The morphology of the microspore consists of an outer double walled structures surrounding the dense cytoplasm and central nucleus. Megaspores contain the female gametophytes in heterosporic plant species, they develop archegonia that produce egg cells that are fertilized by sperm of the male gametophyte originating from the microspore. This results in the formation of a fertilized diploid zygote, that develops into the sporophyte embryo. While heterosporous plants produce fewer megaspores, they are larger than their male counterparts. In exosporic species, the smaller spores germinate into free-living male gametophytes and the larger spores germinate into free-living female gametophytes. In endosporic species, the gametophytes of both sexes are highly reduced and contained within the spore wall; the microspores of both exosporic and endosporic species are free-sporing, distributed by wind, water or animal vectors, but in endosporic species the megaspores and the megagametophyte contained within are retained and nurtured by the sporophyte phase.
Endosporic species are thus dioecious, a condition that promotes outcrossing. Some exosporic species produce micro- and megaspores in the same sporangium, a condition known as homoangy, while in others the micro- and megaspores are produced in separate sporangia; these may both be borne on the same monoecious sporophyte or on different sporophytes in dioicous species. Heterospory was a key event in the evolution of surviving plants; the retention of megaspores and the dispersal of microspores allow for both dispersal and establishment reproductive strategies. This adaptive ability of heterospory increases reproductive success as any type of environment favors having these two strategies. Heterospory stops self-fertilization from occurring in a gametophyte, but does not stop two gametophytes that originated from the same sporophyte from mating; this specific type of self-fertilization is termed as sporophytic selfing, it occurs most among angiosperms. While heterospory stops extreme inbreeding from occurring, it does not prevent inbreeding altogether as sporophytic selfing can still occur.
A complete model for the origin of heterospory, known as the Haig-Westoby model, establishes a connection between minimum spore size and successful reproduction of bisexual gametophytes. For the female function, as minimum spore size increases so does the chance for successful reproduction. For the male function, reproductive success does not change as the minimum spore size increases
Monopodial
Vascular plants with monopodial growth habits grow upward from a single point. They add leaves to the apex each year and the stem grows longer accordingly; the word Monopodial is derived from Greek "mono-", one and "podial", "foot", in reference to the fact that monopodial plants have a single trunk or stem. Orchids with monopodial growth produce copious aerial roots that hang down in long drapes and have green chlorophyll underneath the grey root coverings, which are used as additional photosynthetic organs, they do not have a rhizome or pseudobulbs so species adapted to dry periods have fleshy succulent leaves instead. Flowers come from the stem between the leaves. With some monopodial species, the stem might fork into two, but for all monopodial orchids this is not necessary for continued growth, as opposed to orchids with sympodial growth
Devonian
The Devonian is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic, spanning 60 million years from the end of the Silurian, 419.2 million years ago, to the beginning of the Carboniferous, 358.9 Mya. It is named after Devon, where rocks from this period were first studied; the first significant adaptive radiation of life on dry land occurred during the Devonian. Free-sporing vascular plants began to spread across dry land, forming extensive forests which covered the continents. By the middle of the Devonian, several groups of plants had evolved leaves and true roots, by the end of the period the first seed-bearing plants appeared. Various terrestrial arthropods became well-established. Fish reached substantial diversity during this time, leading the Devonian to be dubbed the "Age of Fishes." The first ray-finned and lobe-finned bony fish appeared, while the placoderms began dominating every known aquatic environment. The ancestors of all four-limbed vertebrates began adapting to walking on land, as their strong pectoral and pelvic fins evolved into legs.
In the oceans, primitive sharks became more numerous than in the Late Ordovician. The first ammonites, species of molluscs, appeared. Trilobites, the mollusc-like brachiopods and the great coral reefs, were still common; the Late Devonian extinction which started about 375 million years ago affected marine life, killing off all placodermi, all trilobites, save for a few species of the order Proetida. The palaeogeography was dominated by the supercontinent of Gondwana to the south, the continent of Siberia to the north, the early formation of the small continent of Euramerica in between; the period is named after Devon, a county in southwestern England, where a controversial argument in the 1830s over the age and structure of the rocks found distributed throughout the county was resolved by the definition of the Devonian period in the geological timescale. The Great Devonian Controversy was a long period of vigorous argument and counter-argument between the main protagonists of Roderick Murchison with Adam Sedgwick against Henry De la Beche supported by George Bellas Greenough.
Murchison and Sedgwick named the period they proposed as the Devonian System. While the rock beds that define the start and end of the Devonian period are well identified, the exact dates are uncertain. According to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the Devonian extends from the end of the Silurian 419.2 Mya, to the beginning of the Carboniferous 358.9 Mya. In nineteenth-century texts the Devonian has been called the "Old Red Age", after the red and brown terrestrial deposits known in the United Kingdom as the Old Red Sandstone in which early fossil discoveries were found. Another common term is "Age of the Fishes", referring to the evolution of several major groups of fish that took place during the period. Older literature on the Anglo-Welsh basin divides it into the Downtonian, Dittonian and Farlovian stages, the latter three of which are placed in the Devonian; the Devonian has erroneously been characterised as a "greenhouse age", due to sampling bias: most of the early Devonian-age discoveries came from the strata of western Europe and eastern North America, which at the time straddled the Equator as part of the supercontinent of Euramerica where fossil signatures of widespread reefs indicate tropical climates that were warm and moderately humid but in fact the climate in the Devonian differed during its epochs and between geographic regions.
For example, during the Early Devonian, arid conditions were prevalent through much of the world including Siberia, North America, China, but Africa and South America had a warm temperate climate. In the Late Devonian, by contrast, arid conditions were less prevalent across the world and temperate climates were more common; the Devonian Period is formally broken into Early and Late subdivisions. The rocks corresponding to those epochs are referred to as belonging to the Lower and Upper parts of the Devonian System. Early DevonianThe Early Devonian lasted from 419.2 ± 2.8 to 393.3 ± 2.5 and began with the Lochkovian stage, which lasted until the Pragian. It spanned from 410.8 ± 2.8 to 407.6 ± 2.5, was followed by the Emsian, which lasted until the Middle Devonian began, 393.3± 2.7 million years ago. During this time, the first ammonoids appeared. Ammonoids during this time period differed little from their nautiloid counterparts; these ammonoids belong to the order Agoniatitida, which in epochs evolved to new ammonoid orders, for example Goniatitida and Clymeniida.
This class of cephalopod molluscs would dominate the marine fauna until the beginning of the Mesozoic era. Middle DevonianThe Middle Devonian comprised two subdivisions: first the Eifelian, which gave way to the Givetian 387.7± 2.7 million years ago. During this time the jawless agnathan fishes began to decline in diversity in freshwater and marine environments due to drastic environmental changes and due to the increasing competition and diversity of jawed fishes; the shallow, oxygen-depleted waters of Devonian inland lakes, surrounded by primitive plants, provided the environment necessary for certain early fish to develop such essential characteristics as well developed lungs, the ability to crawl out of the water and onto the land for short periods of time. Late DevonianFinally, the Late Devonian started with the Frasnian, 382.7 ± 2.8 to 372.2 ± 2.5, during which the first forests took shape on land. The first tetrapods appeared in the fossil record in the ensuing Famennian subdivisi
Neogene
The Neogene is a geologic period and system that spans 20.45 million years from the end of the Paleogene Period 23.03 million years ago to the beginning of the present Quaternary Period 2.58 Mya. The Neogene is sub-divided into two epochs, the earlier Miocene and the Pliocene; some geologists assert that the Neogene cannot be delineated from the modern geological period, the Quaternary. The term "Neogene" was coined in 1853 by the Austrian palaeontologist Moritz Hörnes. During this period and birds continued to evolve into modern forms, while other groups of life remained unchanged. Early hominids, the ancestors of humans, appeared in Africa near the end of the period; some continental movement took place, the most significant event being the connection of North and South America at the Isthmus of Panama, late in the Pliocene. This cut off the warm ocean currents from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, leaving only the Gulf Stream to transfer heat to the Arctic Ocean; the global climate cooled over the course of the Neogene, culminating in a series of continental glaciations in the Quaternary Period that follows.
In ICS terminology, from upper to lower: The Pliocene Epoch is subdivided into 2 ages: Piacenzian Age, preceded by Zanclean AgeThe Miocene Epoch is subdivided into 6 ages: Messinian Age, preceded by Tortonian Age Serravallian Age Langhian Age Burdigalian Age Aquitanian AgeIn different geophysical regions of the world, other regional names are used for the same or overlapping ages and other timeline subdivisions. The terms Neogene System and upper Tertiary System describe the rocks deposited during the Neogene Period; the continents in the Neogene were close to their current positions. The Isthmus of Panama formed, connecting South America; the Indian subcontinent continued forming the Himalayas. Sea levels fell, creating land bridges between Africa and Eurasia and between Eurasia and North America; the global climate became seasonal and continued an overall drying and cooling trend which began at the start of the Paleogene. The ice caps on both poles began to grow and thicken, by the end of the period the first of a series of glaciations of the current Ice Age began.
Marine and continental flora and fauna have a modern appearance. The reptile group Choristodera became extinct in the early part of the period, while the amphibians known as Allocaudata disappeared at the end. Mammals and birds continued to be the dominant terrestrial vertebrates, took many forms as they adapted to various habitats; the first hominins, the ancestors of humans, may have appeared in southern Europe and migrated into Africa. In response to the cooler, seasonal climate, tropical plant species gave way to deciduous ones and grasslands replaced many forests. Grasses therefore diversified, herbivorous mammals evolved alongside it, creating the many grazing animals of today such as horses and bison. Eucalyptus fossil leaves occur in the Miocene of New Zealand, where the genus is not native today, but have been introduced from Australia; the Neogene traditionally ended at the end of the Pliocene Epoch, just before the older definition of the beginning of the Quaternary Period. However, there was a movement amongst geologists to include ongoing geological time in the Neogene, while others insist the Quaternary to be a separate period of distinctly different record.
The somewhat confusing terminology and disagreement amongst geologists on where to draw what hierarchical boundaries is due to the comparatively fine divisibility of time units as time approaches the present, due to geological preservation that causes the youngest sedimentary geological record to be preserved over a much larger area and to reflect many more environments than the older geological record. By dividing the Cenozoic Era into three periods instead of seven epochs, the periods are more comparable to the duration of periods in the Mesozoic and Paleozoic eras; the International Commission on Stratigraphy once proposed that the Quaternary be considered a sub-era of the Neogene, with a beginning date of 2.58 Ma, namely the start of the Gelasian Stage. In the 2004 proposal of the ICS, the Neogene would have consisted of the Miocene and Pliocene epochs; the International Union for Quaternary Research counterproposed that the Neogene and the Pliocene end at 2.58 Ma, that the Gelasian be transferred to the Pleistocene, the Quaternary be recognized as the third period in the Cenozoic, citing key changes in Earth's climate and biota that occurred 2.58 Ma and its correspondence to the Gauss-Matuyama magnetostratigraphic boundary.
In 2006 ICS and INQUA reached a compromise that made Quaternary a subera, subdividing Cenozoic into the old classical Tertiary and Quaternary, a compromise, rejected by International Union of Geological Sciences because it split both Neogene and Pliocene in two. Following formal discussions at the 2008 International Geological Congress in Oslo, the ICS decided in May 2009 to make the Quaternary the youngest period of the Cenozoic Era with its base at 2.58 Mya and including the Gelasian age, considered part of the Neogene Period and Pliocene Epoch. Thus the Neogene Period ends bounding the succeeding Quaternary Period at 2.58 Mya. "Digital Atlas of Neogene Life for the Southeastern United States". San Jose State University. Archived from the original on 2013-04-23. Retrieved 21 September 2018
Fern
A fern is a member of a group of vascular plants that reproduce via spores and have neither seeds nor flowers. They differ from mosses by being vascular, i.e. having specialized tissues that conduct water and nutrients and in having life cycles in which the sporophyte is the dominant phase. Like other vascular plants, ferns have complex leaves called megaphylls, that are more complex than the microphylls of clubmosses. Most ferns are leptosporangiate ferns, sometimes referred to as true ferns, they produce coiled fiddleheads that expand into fronds. The group includes about 10,560 known extant species. Ferns are defined here in the broad sense, being all of the Polypodiopsida, comprising both the leptosporangiate and eusporangiate ferns, the latter itself comprising ferns other than those denominated true ferns, including horsetails or scouring rushes, whisk ferns, marattioid ferns, ophioglossoid ferns. Ferns first appear in the fossil record about 360 million years ago in the late Devonian period, but many of the current families and species did not appear until 145 million years ago in the early Cretaceous, after flowering plants came to dominate many environments.
The fern Osmunda claytoniana is a paramount example of evolutionary stasis. Ferns are not of major economic importance, but some are used for food, medicine, as biofertilizer, as ornamental plants and for remediating contaminated soil, they have been the subject of research for their ability to remove some chemical pollutants from the atmosphere. Some fern species, such as bracken and water fern are significant weeds world wide; some fern genera, such as Azolla can fix nitrogen and make a significant input to the nitrogen nutrition of rice paddies. They play certain roles in mythology and art. Like the sporophytes of seed plants, those of ferns consist of stems and roots. Stems: Fern stems are referred to as rhizomes though they grow underground only in some of the species. Epiphytic species and many of the terrestrial ones have above-ground creeping stolons, many groups have above-ground erect semi-woody trunks; these can reach up to 20 meters tall in a few species. Leaf: The green, photosynthetic part of the plant is technically a megaphyll and in ferns, it is referred to as a frond.
New leaves expand by the unrolling of a tight spiral called a crozier or fiddlehead fern. This uncurling of the leaf is termed circinate vernation. Leaves are divided into a sporophyll. A trophophyll frond is a vegetative leaf analogous to the typical green leaves of seed plants that does not produce spores, instead only producing sugars by photosynthesis. A sporophyll frond is a fertile leaf that produces spores borne in sporangia that are clustered to form sori. In most ferns, fertile leaves are morphologically similar to the sterile ones, they photosynthesize in the same way. In some groups, the fertile leaves are much narrower than the sterile leaves, may have no green tissue at all; the anatomy of fern leaves can either be simple or divided. In tree ferns, the main stalk that connects the leaf to the stem has multiple leaflets; the leafy structures that grow from the stipe are known as pinnae and are again divided into smaller pinnules. Roots: The underground non-photosynthetic structures that take up water and nutrients from soil.
They are always fibrous and structurally are similar to the roots of seed plants. Like all other vascular plants, the diploid sporophyte is the dominant phase or generation in the life cycle; the gametophytes of ferns, are different from those of seed plants. They are free-living and resemble liverworts, whereas those of seed plants develop within the spore wall and are dependent on the parent sporophyte for their nutrition. A fern gametophyte consists of: Prothallus: A green, photosynthetic structure, one cell thick heart or kidney shaped, 3–10 mm long and 2–8 mm broad; the prothallus produces gametes by means of: Antheridia: Small spherical structures that produce flagellate sperm. Archegonia: A flask-shaped structure that produces a single egg at the bottom, reached by the sperm by swimming down the neck. Rhizoids: root-like structures that consist of single elongated cells, that absorb water and mineral salts over the whole structure. Rhizoids anchor the prothallus to the soil. Ferns first appear in the fossil record in the early Carboniferous period.
By the Triassic, the first evidence of ferns related to several modern families appeared. The great fern radiation occurred in the late Cretaceous, when many modern families of ferns first appeared. Ferns were traditionally classified in the class Filices, in a Division of the Plant Kingdom named Pteridophyta or Filicophyta. Pteridophyta is no longer recognised as a valid taxon; the ferns are referred to as Polypodiophyta or, when treated as a subdivision of Tracheophyta, although this name sometimes only refers to leptosporangiate ferns. Traditionally, all of the spore producing vascular plants were informally denominated the pteridophytes, rendering the term synonymous with ferns and fern allies; this can be confusing because members of the division Pteridophyta were denominated pteridophytes. Traditionally, three discrete groups have be
Trimerophytopsida
Trimerophytopsida is a class of early vascular plants from the Devonian, informally called trimerophytes. It contains genera such as Psilophyton; this group is paraphyletic, is believed to be the ancestral group from which both the ferns and seed plants evolved. Different authors have treated the group at different taxonomic ranks using the names Trimerophyta, Trimerophytophyta, Trimerophytophytina and Trimerophytales. At first most of the early land plants other than the bryophytes were placed in a single class Psilophyta, established in 1917 by Kidston and Lang; as additional fossils were discovered and described, it became apparent that the Psilophyta were not a homogeneous group of plants. In 1968 Banks first proposed splitting this taxon into three groups, which he put at the rank of subdivision. One of the three groups was the Trimerophytina; the subdivision is based on the type genus Trimerophyton, which might be expected to produce'Trimerophytophytina' as the name of the subdivision, but the International Code of Nomenclature for algae and plants allows the'phyton' part of a genus name optionally to be omitted before'-ophyta','-ophytina' and'-opsida'.
The group has since been treated as a division under the name Trimerophyta or Trimerophytophyta, as a class under the name Trimeropsida or Trimerophytopsida, as an order under the name Trimerophytales. Subphylum †Trimerophytina Banks 1975Class †Trimerophytopsida Foster & Gifford 1974 Order †Trimerophytales Banks ex Kasper et al. 1974 Family †Trimerophytaceae Banks 1967 Genus †Dawsonites Nemejc 1963 Genus †Hostinella Barrande ex Stur 1882 Genus †Oocampsa Andrews, Gensel & Kasper 1975 Genus †Euphyllophyton Hao & Beck Genus †Pauthecophyton Xue et al. 2012 Genus †Psilophyton Dawson 1859 emend. Hueber & Banks 1967 Genus †Trimerophyton Hopping 1956 Euphyllophyta, containing seed plants and ferns Gensel, P. G. & Edwards, D. eds. Plants invade the Land: Evolutionary & Environmental Perspectives, New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-11161-4
