BIOL-UA 12 Lecture 23: Lecture 23
Document Summary
Lecture 23: plant evolution: there was a rapid explosion of species of owering plants: goes against darwin"s ideas of gradual evolution. It was an abominable mystery. : mosses and ferns predate dinosaurs and are still extant species. Aquatic forms of algae adapted to fresh water ponds. The algae were the ancestors to mosses, which were ancestors to ferns. The ferns developed a vascular system and evolved to gymnosperms. Evidence that land plants and green algae share a common ancestor: Charophytes are the closest living ancestors to land plants. Land plants are seen as embryophytes as they have embryos retained on seeds. We can understand that charophytes and embryophytes share a common ancestor because of deep green, a project that sequences the dna of a select set of genes across all plant species. Based on shared derived traits (sequences shared with charophytes and embryophytes, but not with chlorophytes and red algae). Aquatic algae live in shallow waters in ponds.