Cooksonia
Group of vascular land plants (extinct) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Cooksonia is an extinct group of primitive land plants, treated as a genus, although probably not monophyletic. The earliest Cooksonia date from the middle of the Silurian (the Wenlock epoch);[1] the group continued to be an important component of the flora until the end of the Early Devonian, a total time span of 433 to 393 million years ago. While Cooksonia fossils are distributed globally, most type specimens come from Britain, where they were first discovered in 1937.[4] Cooksonia includes the oldest known plant to have a stem with vascular tissue and is thus a transitional form between the primitive non-vascular bryophytes and the vascular plants.[5]
Cooksonia | |
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A cartoon of Cooksonia, reconstructed with non-photosynthetic axes, dependent on its gametophyte, as per Boyce (2008) | |
Scientific classification | |
Kingdom: | Plantae |
Clade: | Tracheophytes |
Stem group: | †Rhyniophytes |
Form taxon: | †Cooksonioidea |
Genus: | †Cooksonia Lang 1937 emend. Gonez & Gerrienne 2010[3] non Druce 1905 |
Type species | |
Cooksonia pertoni Lang 1937 | |
Species | |
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