A review stemming from a symposium at the last Botanical Society of America meeting before the pandemic, this article summarizes and updates information on the colonization of the land. One of the important points in the review comes from micropaleontological and molecular systematic (“time tree”) evidence indicating that there was a terrestrial flora dating back to the Cambrian, 500 Ma ago, and perhaps older, that simply didn’t leave very much in the way of body fossils. This makes a lot of sense in terms of our understanding of the properties of the algal relatives of plants, and the fact that organisms referable to modern lineages appear fairly quickly after the first body fossils are found.

McCourt et al., 2023 AJB 110:e16175

Phylogeny of plants and algae in the context of the geological record.