Sawdonia ornata - fossil land plants from the Devonian of Quebec, Canada. (FMNH PP33627, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA)

Plants are multicellular, photosynthetic eucaryotes. The oldest known land plant body fossils are Silurian in age. Fossil root traces of land plants are known back in the Ordovician. The Devonian was the key time interval during which land plants flourished and Earth experienced its first “greening” of the land. The earliest land plants were small and simple and probably remained close to bodies of water. By the Late Devonian, land plants had evolved large, tree-sized bodies and the first-ever forests appeared.

Sawdonia is an early land plant. The specimens shown here are preserved as carbonized compressions. Notice that the stems (axes) have numerous spines (click on the photo to zoom in). Sawdonia is a member of the Zosterophyllopsida, which was the ancestral group of the lycopods (scale trees).

Classification: Plantae, Tracheophyta, Zosterophyllopsida, Sawdoniales, Sawdoniaceae

Stratigraphy: unrecorded/undisclosed

Locality: unrecorded/undisclosed site in Quebec, Canada

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