Growing Story

Ancient lichens might have paved the way for plants

- Taylor Mitchell Brown

Artistic reconstruction of Spongiophyton during the Early Devonian

AROUND 410 MILLION YEARS AGO terrestrial life was relatively simple. There were no forests or prairies—land was largely dominated by slimy microbial mats. The types of plants that would eventually give rise to trees and flowers had only just evolved and would take another several million years to fully flourish and diversify.

A new discovery is rewriting the story of how these vascular plants, as they are called, spread onto land. Researchers might have finally resolved a debate about the pervasive but enigmatic fossil organism called Spongiophyton: it seems to have been an unusual life-form called a lichen that could have helped pave the way for land plants to thrive.

The discovery, published recently in Science Advances, says paleontologist Geovane Gaia of the Institute of Geosciences at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, who was not involved with the research. Rather than appearing only after vascular plants, as most assumed, lichens.