ABOVE: A variety of plant spore fossils preserved in circa 480 million-year-old rock from the Canning Basin in Western Australia
PAUL STROTHER
A variety of fossilized plant spores have been found in rocks from Western Australia that date from the early Ordovician era—approximately 480 million years ago. According to a paper published in Science today (12 August), some of the spores may have belonged to early forms of land-dwelling algae, from which other land plants are thought to have originated.
“I think [the paper] is interesting for a few reasons,” says paleobiologist Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol who was not involved with the study. “It extends the fossil record of [early land plants] by something like 20 million years. . . . Also, potentially [the fossils] provide a sort of intermediate between the Cambrian record and the later Ordovician records.”
Plants that live on land are thought to have ...
