Weird features of the plant kingdom – Part 1
If you thought the animal kingdom was strange, try the kingdom of the plant. Especially terrestrial species had much more time to evolve into what they are now than any fully terrestrial animal species ever had. When mosses like the liverwort started to take over the land, it took quite some time before aquatic animals started to take on a terrestrial life permanently.
It is believed that liverwort, the first species that could live on land, did so 476 million years ago. The first independent terrestrial animal is thought to have moved on land 450 million years ago, Now, 27 million years look like nothing over a period of nearly 500 million years, but humans, or more specifically: primitive Homo sapiens first appeared 300.000 years ago. So terrestrial plant life has an advantage of more than 475 million years over people and 27 million over terrestrial animals. That is 90x the time it took for humans to evolve from primitive homo sapiens to what we are today. Take the modern homo sapiens and we’re talking about 200.000 years back in time.
We as a species are just a blip, animals though, or plants… That’s a whole different story.
