These tools will no longer be maintained as of December 31, 2024. Archived website can be found here. PubMed4Hh GitHub repository can be found here. Contact NLM Customer Service if you have questions.


Pubmed for Handhelds

PUBMED FOR HANDHELDS

Search MEDLINE/PubMed

  • Title: A fossil record of land plant origins from charophyte algae.
    Author: Strother PK, Foster C.
    Journal: Science; 2021 Aug 13; 373(6556):792-796. PubMed ID: 34385396.
    Abstract:
    Molecular time trees indicating that embryophytes originated around 500 million years ago (Ma) during the Cambrian are at odds with the record of fossil plants, which first appear in the mid-Silurian almost 80 million years later. This time gap has been attributed to a missing fossil plant record, but that attribution belies the case for fossil spores. Here, we describe a Tremadocian (Early Ordovician, about 480 Ma) assemblage with elements of both Cambrian and younger embryophyte spores that provides a new level of evolutionary continuity between embryophytes and their algal ancestors. This finding suggests that the molecular phylogenetic signal retains a latent evolutionary history of the acquisition of the embryophytic developmental genome, a history that perhaps began during Ediacaran-Cambrian time but was not completed until the mid-Silurian (about 430 Ma).
    [Abstract] [Full Text] [Related] [New Search]