Cooksonia
Cooksonia (o.a. C. pertoni)
Cooksonia is one of the earliest well-known vascular plants and documents the colonisation of land.
Image: Jonathan Chen · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
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Sites on today's globe · 1 marker
Characteristics
- Scientific name
- Cooksonia (o.a. C. pertoni)
- Period
- Silurian–Early Devonian
- Lived
- 433–393 Ma (433 million years ago)
- Diet
- Photosynthetic
- Habitat
- Coast, Swamp
- Length (estimate)
- 0.05 m
Description
Cooksonia consisted of short, leafless stems that repeatedly forked in two. Small spore-bearing capsules grew at their tips; true leaves, roots and wood were absent. The plant remained close to the ground and probably grew in moist areas where the first land plants were spreading. The fossils do not directly show how water and minerals moved through its simple stems.
Habitat
Moist banks and periodically flooded coastal plains.
Fossil sites
Perton Lane, Herefordshire (Welsh Borders)
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Contemporaries in the database
Sources: Cooksonia