We provide indoor plant care information for the homeowner, garden center personnel, and plantscape.

And speaking about plants and landscapes, since we, the people of Andinia are explorers, we also like to take a look at the past; in this case, palaeobotanics. It is an intriguing and fascinating topic, especially because plants, which are organisms capable of producing metabolic energy thorough photosynthesis, precede us in this planet by a long, long time.

Some years ago in Transvaal, South Africa, some bacterial fossils were found; they were identified as cyanobacteria, which are the minutest and most primitive organisms capable of performing photosynthesis. In other words, these are the first plants on Earth, and they were dated as two thousand, four hundred and fifty million years old.

Yes, this means: 2.450.000.000 years ago, we already had plants on this planet, which equals to say that they are two thousand, four hundred and fifty times older that us, because humans have been roaming this sphere for about one million years. Some scientists now put the origin of plants one thousand million years further, to 3.500.000.000 years ago; while some fossils of that age have indeed been found, there is a debate still going on about some facts about them, including the question of whether these were cyanobacteria too, or not.

Animal fossils with a modes exoskeleton date back to about one thousand million years; animal species profusion began about eight hundred million years ago, at the Ediacaran period of the Proterozoic era; however complex animal evolution began in earnest only about 550 million years ago, including the first carnivores found to date. It is not easy to imagine how that world was, and even less to conceive that that world is in fact ours; there are only few rocks to study that date back to those far away times, but it is quite probable that the whole world, including ancient continents and seas, were covered with a green lime of sorts.

The main difficulty to study these things it that despite the fact that geology is a static thing, it is in reality a dynamic process; the shape of our world changes constantly and over such spans of time, those modifications have - literally - a grinding effect on rocks from which is exceedingly rare for anything to escape. But it seems that the appearance of the first grazing animals initiated a change in vegetation too, for plants had then to adapt to a more hostile environment to what they had enjoyed for aeons without much need for further adaptation.

Until then, and for hundreds of millions of years and an unimaginable number of strangely coloured sunsets, Earth was just the empire of plants. And this is why it is very important for all of us to care about our planet: we have a responsibility, and we cannot let ourselves be the cause of the destruction of such immense things.

So, if it is at all possible, we invite you to link to this page from your website, so others may also learn about these facts and give ecology the importance that it deserves.

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