Perspective: the origin of vascular plants

Land plants, plants that complete their life cycle entirely in a terrestrial environment, are represented largely by bryophytes and vascular plants. In all taxa except seed plants, however, at least a thin film of water is required for fertilization; and even in two primitive groups of seed plants, the cycads and Ginkgo, fertilization is by free-swimming spermatozoids released into a liquid medium in the archegonial chamber. A few angiosperms, although terrestrial in origin, have reverted to an aquatic existence.

Vascular plants are by far the dominant groups on the Earth comprising over 255,000 species in contrast to about 22,000 species of bryophytes and approximately 20,000 species of algae. The first vascular plants appear in the fossil record in the late Silurian, about 420 million years ago, but their green algal ancestors are thought to have appeared nearly 400 million years earlier! Shared features comprise the major evidence that vascular plants, possibly also bryophytes, evolved from green algae: both synthesize chlorophylls a and b, both store true starch in plastids; both have motile cells with whiplash flagella, and both (but only a few green algae) are characterized by phragmoplast and cell plate formation following mitosis. A green alga, with these and other significant characteristics, that may provide a model of an algal ancestor of vascular plants is Coleochaete, a member of the Charophyceae.