Origin of Life: early land life (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, July 28, 2013, 15:37 (4137 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Tony: (Bear in mind that I do believe plants came first an in great quantities long before animals, I am just questioning the huge time frame for the move from simple to complex plant organisms.)-David: The explosion in the type of plants we have today occurred 100 million years or more after the Cambrian. I forget the exact time frame. Simpler plants certainly flourished long before that.-TONY: So we had a few billion years where plants could have exploded into infinite variety and complexity, with an atmosphere that was conducive to them, but they didn't.-Sorry, but how do you know the pre-Cambrian atmosphere was conducive to them? Was not being oxygen rich all that was needed to guarantee an explosion? Might it even be possible that the explosion in plant life actually resulted from the explosion in animal life, since the latter would have meant lots of new vegetarians on the prowl? Maybe plants found new ways of propagating, defending themselves, attracting pollinators. I wonder what your own explanation is.