Plants of Long Ago
Plants of Long Ago
The plants that grew on earth hundreds of millions of years ago didn’t look much like the plants we see around us today.
Scientists have learned a great deal about what the world was like long ago. The men and women who study these things have put facts and ideas together. They have given us a story of how they think the world has changed in the course of billions of years. According to them, we owe a lot to the strange-looking plants of long ago.
Here, then, is part of the story that these scientists have worked out.
The first plants
> Long ago, the land was empty. All the plants and animals lived in the > water. > > They looked like tiny blobs of jelly. Many hundreds of millions of years ago, the world was a scary place!…
The air makers
Most scientists think that the first tiny sea plants made it possible for life to come onto the land. To live, plants and animals must take in a gas called oxygen. The tiny sea plants and animals of…
The plants that conquered the land
Scientists think that the first living thing on land came out of the water about 500 million years ago. The sea was full of living things. There were jellyfish, sponges, worms, and small, crablike…
The soil makers
Hundreds of millions of years ago, all the land was just bare, hard rock, sand, or clay. Now, soil covers most of the land. Where did the soil come from? Plants and weather made it. The first living…
