New Zealand team finds early plant arrivers dominated landscape
(PhysOrg.com) -- It seems intuitive that not all plant species could have taken a foothold on land at the same time all those millions of years ago as conditions on Earth evolved to the point where they could survive; some had to come first, which means of course, that some had to come after. But did the order in which they arrived make any difference in how those plant species evolved? Or to put it another way, did the plants that arrived first enjoy an advantage that has survived to this very day? Dr William Lee and his colleagues from Landcare Research in New Zealand thought the idea seemed plausible, so they set themselves the task of finding out. As it turns out, as the team describes in their paper published in Biology Letters, those that arrived first, did appear to take advantage of their status and flourished, leaving those...