Flowering Plant
The flowering plants (angiosperms), also known as Angiospermae or Magnoliophyta, are the most diverse group of land plants. Angiosperms are seed-producing plants like the gymnosperms and can be distinguished from the gymnosperms by a series of synapomorphies (derived characteristics). These characteristics include flowers, endosperm within the seeds, and the production of fruits that contain the seeds. Etymologically, angiosperm means a plant that produces seeds within an enclosure; they are fruiting plants, although more commonly referred to as flowering plants.
The ancestors of flowering plants diverged from gymnosperms around 245–202 million years ago, and the first flowering plants known to exist are from 140 million years ago. They diversified enormously during the Lower Cretaceous and became widespread around 100 million years ago, but replaced conifers as the dominant trees only around 60–100 million years ago.
Read more about Flowering Plant: Angiosperm Derived Characteristics, Evolution, Classification, Vascular Anatomy, Economic Importance
Famous quotes containing the words flowering and/or plant:
“What
Reply can the vast flowering strike from us,
Unless it be the one
You make today in London: to be married?”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)