The term ‘prehistoric’ relates to the period of time that passed between the appearance of the first stone tools left behind by human-like apes (three million or so years ago) and the first written records, about 5,000 years ago, at which point proper history begins.
For most of us, though, the word conjures scenes of a more ancient world than that, one populated by the likes of T. Rex, Triceratops, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, ammonites and trilobites. But the distant past was a time of botanical wonders, too.
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Throughout human history (and prehistory), most of the planet’s vegetation has been composed of flowering plants, or angiosperms, in the form of trees, grasses, herbs, shrubs and bushes. But flowering plants didn’t appear until 130 million years ago. Before that, the world was dominated by other groups.
For hundreds of millions of years after life began, plants were largely restricted to the oceans. The first land plants, descended from aquatic algae, appeared about 500 million years ago and resembled today’s mosses and liverworts. These pioneers would have made the land more habitable for animals, by providing a source of food and fertilising the atmosphere with oxygen (a by-product of photosynthesis). By the time the first amphibians were hauling themselves out of the water (350 million years ago), terrestrial plantlife was well established, if still modest in stature.
But it was around that time that an early fern called Wattieza developed rigid woody structures that allowed it to grow to a height of at least 8m. Tree-like proportions were also reached by a type of horsetail called Calamites. These close relatives of the ferns grew in bamboo-like thickets up to 20m tall. Clubmosses got even bigger. Modern clubmosses are unobtrusive plants, just a few centimetres high, but during the Carboniferous period (360 to 300 million years ago), they reached 45m in height and formed dense forests.
Meanwhile, the age of the dinosaurs could equally have been called the age of the cycads. These palm-like members of the gymnosperms, the group that includes pines, firs, larches and spruces, were among the first plants to produce seeds rather than spores. Cycads became dominant during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods (252 to 66 million years ago), and they would have been a plentiful source of fodder for the herbivorous reptiles that roamed the Earth back then, though their reign was brought to an end by the comet that finished the dinosaurs.
Main image: Carboniferous flora / Getty
More prehistoric discoveries
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