When dinosaurs first became numerous in the late Triassic Period, nearly all of the major groups of vascular plants except the angiosperms were in existence. Conifers, cycadophytes, ginkgoes, ferns and large arborescent horsetails dominated the landscape.
This is because 90% of all living plant species are flowering plants (i.e., angiosperms). But when dinosaurs first evolved 225 million years ago (mya), flowers were nowhere to be found. The first land plants did not produce seeds; instead, they reproduced using spores.
Palm tree-like cycads were abundant, as were conifers such as araucaria and pines. Ginkgoes carpeted the mid- to high northern latitudes, and podocarps, a type of conifer, were particularly successful south of the Equator. Tree ferns were also present.
The first land plants, including horsetails and ferns, produced new plants via spores. Gymnosperms were the next major group of plants to evolve. They produced true seeds in cone-like structures. After that came the angiosperms — plants with “true flowers” that produce seeds within protected ovaries (fruits).
The Wollemia nobilis was common across Australia from more than 100 million years ago to about 60 million years ago.
Posidonia australis is an ancient and incredibly resilient seagrass that has been discovered in Shark Bay, Western Australia. It's at least 4,500 years old and spans 180km of shallow ocean.
In 1788 when the ships of the First Fleet landed in Australia they brought a plant — prickly pear. Prickly pear would provide benefits to Australia, but problems as well. In fact it would completely transform parts of the landscape.
A Russian team discovered a seed cache of Silene stenophylla, a flowering plant native to Siberia, that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel near the banks of the Kolyma River (map). Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the seeds were 32,000 years old.
The oldest organism in the world is 600,000-year-old Siberian bacteria, and the oldest plant is a 200,000-year-old sea grass meadow near Spain. But the Southwest has the distinction of being home to the largest concentration of old plant species.
Recent findings of dinosaur poo suggest that early grasses were around at the end of the Cretaceous, but there is not any fossil evidence to show how flowering plants actually evolved. The likely plants that Diplodocus ate include: ferns, cycads, horsetails, club mosses, seed ferns, conifers and gingkoes.
Today, we are going to learn about plant eating dinosaurs called herbivores! Some of the most commonly known plant eaters are Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and Ankylosaurus. These plant eating dinosaurs had to eat a lot of plants each day!
Flowers and all groups of plants lived through the extinction. The mass extinction was traumatic for plants but they survived the hard times. Fortunately for the Earth – and for us – they did not go the same way as the non-bird dinosaurs.
Fossils that indicate feathered dinos also contained trace evidence that suggested the feathers could have been brown, black red or white. So, without any real evidence either way, it's entirely possible that a pink or purple dinosaur could have existed.
The Sauropoda were long-necked, long-tailed, enormous herbivorous dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and Apatosaurus. Theropoda consists of the carnivorous dinosaurs. The Theropoda includes some extinct dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Dilophosaurus.
The earliest known vascular plants come from the Silurian period. Cooksonia is often regarded as the earliest known fossil of a vascular land plant, and dates from just 425 million years ago in the late Early Silurian. It was a small plant, only a few centimetres high.
The longest-lived leaves of all plants belong to the welwitschia (Welwitschia mirabilis), named after botanist, Dr Friedrich Welwitsch (Austria), who discovered the plant (looking like a "stranded octopus") in 1859 in its native Namib Desert of Namibia and Angola.
The oldest fossils of land plants date back about 470 million years. The first land plants probably resembled modern plants called liverworts, like the one shown in Figure below. The first land plants may have been similar to liverworts like this one. Colonization of the land was a huge step in plant evolution.
Algae are considered as the true and earliest ancestors of higher plants due to many similarities in their cell wall components, presence of chlorophyll pigment and the utilization of starch as reserve food material.
Kangaroo paw (Anigozanthos)
This unique Australian plant get's its name from its furry flower which is shaped just like a kangaroo's paw. They're often red in colour, but in the wild their flowers can also range from green to pink, yellow and black.
The Proteaceae family of flowering plants, including banksias, grevilleas and waratahs, are among Australia's most popular natives. A key characteristic of the Proteaceae family is that flower heads are made up of a number of small flowers.
Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus agg.) was deliberately introduced into New South Wales from Britain in the 1840s for its fruit and for making hedgerows. Shortly after, it escaped into the wild and by the 1880s was recognised as a significant weed. Blackberry is most common in south-eastern New South Wales.
What are the oldest trees? If we define a “tree” as a single stemmed woody plant at least 2m tall, which is what most people would identify as a tree, then the oldest in Australia could be a Huon Pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii) in Tasmania, the oldest stem of which is up to 2000 years old.