“The first land plants were simple, small things like mosses that lived in wet environments on land between about 450 and 420 million years ago during the Ordovician and Silurian Periods. Bigger plants with deeper roots that could live in drier environments evolved shortly after, in the Devonian Period,” said Alex Brasier, co-author of the paper that explains these findings.
According to Brasier, these primitive plants spread across the land, transforming what was once a Mars-like planet of barren rock into a world of life growing in organic-rich soils.
“Some of the most spectacular and important early land plant fossils on earth are from the village of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire, where minerals precipitated from a hot spring and fossilized their stems—together with other things that were living on the plants like the ancestors of insects—407 million years ago,” he pointed out.
The scientist said that the study will…
