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posted by martyb on Friday October 27 2017, @06:49AM   Printer-friendly
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)


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  • (Score: 2) by Virindi on Friday October 27 2017, @07:01PM

    by Virindi (3484) on Friday October 27 2017, @07:01PM (#588366)

    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]

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