Cooksonia

For the butterfly, see Cooksonia (butterfly).

Cooksonia
Temporal range: Wenlock–Early Devonian[1][2]
C. pertoni fossil (USNM 298794), National Museum of Natural History
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Tracheophytes
Stem group: †Rhyniophytes
Form taxon: †Cooksonioidea
Genus: †Cooksonia
Lang 1937 emend. Gonez & Gerrienne 2010[3] non Druce 1905
Type species
Cooksonia pertoni
Lang 1937
Species
  • C. paranensis Gerrienne et al. 2001
  • C. pertoni Lang 1937[Note 1]
  • ?C. acuminata Mussa et al. 2002
  • ?C. barrandei Libertín et al. 2018
  • ?C. cambrensis Edwards 1979
  • ?C. degrezensis Senkevich
  • ?C. downtonensis Heard 1939
  • ?C. rusanovii Ananiev 1960
  • ?C. zhanyiensis Li & Cai 1978

Cooksonia is an extinct group of primitive land plants, treated as a genus, although probably not monophyletic. The earliest Cooksonia date from the middle of the Silurian (the Wenlock epoch);[1] the group continued to be an important component of the flora until the end of the Early Devonian, a total time span of 433 to 393 million years ago. While Cooksonia fossils are distributed globally, most type specimens come from Britain, where they were first discovered in 1937.[4] Cooksonia includes the oldest known plant to have a stem with vascular tissue and is thus a transitional form between the primitive non-vascular bryophytes and the vascular plants.[5]

  1. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Edwards1980 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Boyce2008 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference GonezGerrienne2010a was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Lang1937 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Freeman, Scott; Herron, Jon C. (2004). Evolutionary analysis (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. p. 816. ISBN 978-0-13-101859-4.


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