A group of living things
Seed plants
Spermatophyta
A baby plant with a packed lunch.
Its members' last common ancestor lived about 350 million years ago.
You and seed plants last shared an ancestor about 1.8 billion years ago (on 28 July, if life's history were one year).
Picture a baby plant usually packed with its own lunch and sealed in a coat, often tough, able to sleep until the weather suits it. That is a seed. Seed plants share the land-plant family with cousins like mosses and ferns, but those cousins still make dust-like spores and need water for swimming sperm. Seed plants instead send pollen, tiny grains often like fine dust, so they can live far from ponds and streams.
Seeds are carried in different ways. Many cone-bearers, like pines, keep naked seeds tucked between the scales of woody cones. In pines, wind carries pollen from cone to cone. Flowering plants make flowers, and after pollination part of the middle of the flower grows into fruit around the seeds. Some fruits use sweet flesh to invite animals to eat and drop seeds elsewhere. Others use wings, fluffy parachutes and spiny burrs to catch wind or fur.
This trick works almost everywhere. Seed plants rule most places where plants grow today, from hot deserts to cold northern forests where cone-bearers stand through freezing winters. They have built most forests since dinosaur times began.
Seeds that woke after 2,000 years
Date seeds about 2,000 years old from Masada and other old sites grew into living palms, including a male palm nicknamed Methuselah.
From dust to heavyweight
Orchid seeds are dust-like specks with almost no packed food, so in the wild they need to team up with a fungus to sprout. At the other extreme, the coco de mer grows a seed of up to about 18 kilograms, almost as heavy as a large sack of potatoes.
Pollination before flowers
Long before flowers, some insects visited some seed plants for sweet drops. In Jurassic times, scorpionflies with straw-like mouthparts up to about 1.3 centimetres long, about as long as a fingernail, sipped sweet drops from deep tubes.