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from the if-you're-not-interested,-would-you-be-board? dept.
The world's first trees grew by splitting their guts:
Scientists have discovered some of the best preserved specimens of the world's first trees in a remote region of China. At up to 12 meters tall, these spindly species were topped by a clump of erect branches vaguely resembling modern palm trees and lived a whopping 393 million to 372 million years ago. But the biggest surprise is how they got so big in the first place.
[...] The fossils reveal that, unlike modern trees with a single shaft, cladoxylopsids had multiple xylem columns spaced around the perimeter of a hollow trunk. A network of crisscrossing strands connected the vertical xylem—much like a chain-link fence spreads from pole to pole—and soft tissue filled the spaces between all these strands. New growth formed in rings around each of the xylem columns while an increasing volume of soft tissue forced the strands to spread out.
All of this expanded the girth of the trunk, allowing for a taller tree. But it also split apart the tree's xylem skeleton, which required the tree to continually repair itself, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The weight of the tree squeezed tissue at the base of the trunk outward.
Also at Newsweek.
Unique growth strategy in the Earth's first trees revealed in silicified fossil trunks from China (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1708241114) (DX)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday October 27 2017, @06:04PM (2 children)
> some of the best preserved specimens of the world's first trees
Riiight ... The first trees were 12m tall. You've either got a giant step in evolution, or an interesting step in taxonomy.
"The eldest things we can find and still call trees", maybe?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 27 2017, @06:33PM (1 child)
A while ago I put together a timeline of evolution, mostly for my own amusement. The relevant parts:
380 myo: plant seeds appear
385 myo: 1st woody plants, tree ferns: Wattieza, Archaeopteris.
428 myo: 1st vascular (tubes) plants: Cooksonia.
470 myo: 1st land plants.
There's an answer to the age old chicken and egg sort of question, did seeds or plants come first? And the answer is plants. Without seeds, they had to propagate some other way.
Anyway, wood appearing in the record about 385 myo fits with this story.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Friday October 27 2017, @07:01PM
I know this might have been intended as humor, but...
Many plants are able to reproduce without seed, by sending out single roots which then form a new plant. Similar behavior also exists in some colonies of simple organisms. So, it seems possible that this method of reproduction, independently evolved from sexual reproduction, was carried all the way into modern plants.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolon [wikipedia.org]