How did plants first evolve into all different shapes and sizes? We mapped a billion years of plant history to find out

• This even applies to us: all the different placental mammals evolved from a common ancestor surprisingly quickly.
• In our new study, we sought to answer this question by looking for certain traits in each major plant group.
• We expected flowering plants to dominate the design space since they make up more than 80% of plant species, but they don’t.
• Nevertheless, some of the distinctiveness of the different groupings in design space is clearly the result of extinction.

So how did plant body plan diversity evolve?

• These represent the evolutionary solutions to the environmental challenges faced by plants in their progressive occupation of increasingly dry and challenging niches on the land surface.
• The drivers of plant anatomical evolution appear to be a combination of genomic potential and environmental opportunity.

Plant disparity suggests that the big bang is a bust

• Instead, it seems fundamental forms of plants have emerged hierarchically through evolutionary history, elaborating on the anatomical chassis inherited from their ancestors.
• They have not lost their capacity for innovation over the billion or more years of their evolutionary longevity.
• So does that make plants different from animals, studies of which are the basis for the expectation of early evolutionary innovation and exhaustion?