A group of living things
Land plants
Embryophyta
The water plants that crawled out and turned bare rock green.
Its members' last common ancestor lived about 470 million years ago.
You and land plants last shared an ancestor about 1.8 billion years ago (on 28 July, if life's history were one year).
Once bare rock had no grass, trees or mosses. Then plants crawled out of the water and turned that bare land green. They arose from green algae, and their closest living algal relatives are charophytes. Even nori seaweed is a distant cousin, but it is a red alga, not a land plant.
Life on land meant drying out, so these newcomers grew a waxy skin over their shoots to hold in water. Most also have tiny pores that open and shut to let air in and out. They also teamed up with soil fungi, which passed up nutrients from the soil in return for food made in sunlight. And they sheltered their young inside the parent plant.
The first land plants seem to have been small, damp-loving mats only a few centimetres tall, much like mosses and liverworts today. Later kinds grew tubes for moving water and food, so they could grow tall and spread far from streams. Now forests cover about 30% of the land on Earth, and their leaves and trunks lock away carbon from the air.
Huge family
More than 300,000 species in this group have been catalogued, including more than 260,000 seed plants. Ferns, conifers and flowering plants are all members.
Giant and tiny
The tallest known land plant is Hyperion, a coast redwood about 115 metres tall, as tall as a 35-storey building. The smallest are watermeal plants, each less than 1 millimetre long, like green grains floating on ponds.
Antarctic survivors
Three kinds of moss live in one cold, windy part of East Antarctica, where they survive months of darkness, freezing cold and drought by making antifreeze and sunscreen and pausing growth.