Biologists create a one-stop shop for world’s most charismatic plants
The Florida Museum of Natural History has partnered with 35 herbarium collections across the United States to create a web portal for ferns.
Wait! Hear me out. You’re probably thinking, “Ferns? The plants with the curly leaves that grow in shady places? Why should I care?”
I’m glad you asked. Ferns — and a related group called lycophytes — have been around in one form or another for more than 400 million years. This group of plants, collectively called pteridophytes, was the first to develop roots and leaves, which it did long before dinosaurs were even a gleam in evolution’s eye. They were the first plants to evolve the botanical equivalent of a circulatory system, which allowed them to grow into the first trees.
Ferns, lycophytes and other early offshoots altered Earth’s previously barren landscapes, breaking up bare rock with their roots and dissolving it in acid, a process that pulls carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They did this so thoroughly that it caused an ice age, resulting in the second mass extinction of life on Earth. And that’s only the first 50 million years of their evolutionary history. It only gets more interesting from there. But in the interest of time, we’ll skip to the present.
Today, there are more than 10,000 species of ferns and lycophytes, making them the second-most diverse group of vascular plants (the ones with a circulatory system, which includes anything that produces seeds).
“You can’t understand plant diversity without including ferns,” said Michael Sundue, an integrative taxonomist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in Scotland and co-author of a new paper announcing the fern portal and describing its various applications.
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