Plant Life: A Brief History

Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution, described the evolutionary origin of flowering plants, which appear to have risen abruptly during the late Cretaceous Period, as an "abominable mystery." The first seed plants appeared in the fossil record some 230 million years earlier, but the transitions leading to the flowering plants left few fossils and remain obscure. The evolutionary history of photosynthetic organisms is full of mysteries great and small, including the origin o...