Sciadopityacae

The only single seeded conifer present in the northern hemisphere, out competed by other plants, especially pines, you were stranded, around 230 million years ago.

Constant pressure on your numbers squeezed you out of almost every niche, until, in the present day, you are found only on the islands of Japan.

You are a 'living fossil'.

On the other hand, you are one of the five sacred trees of Japan, you are planted in temple gardens and palaces, and your slow growing, very dense wood is highly prized.  So, not all bad.

Single seed conifers

At this time in history, most of the land is present in one large landmass called Gondwanaland.  Conifers spread across it.

But eventually, under the influence of tectonic plate activity, Gondwanaland begins to break up.  This leads to an example of speciation by literally drifting apart.  Some single seeded conifers stay on the northern section, others on the southern.  Inevitably, these identical trees are going to split into two different species, as their continued adaptation to their environment will mean that by the time they meet again, in a few million years, they will no longer be able to fertilise each other.

North?
South?

Ordinary Pines

Pine trees sweep across most of the mountains of the northern hemisphere.  They are adapted with soft, springy branches which tolerate the weight of snow, and sap which will not freeze.

They are used for many kinds of interior wood work, and are associated with pagan religious observation in Europe and North America.

They can even be eaten - the Adirondack area of the United States takes its name from the Adirondack Indians.  This was a nickname given by the neighbouring tribes meaning 'tree eaters', due to their habit of eating and drinking parts of the pine tree, chewed, or as a tea.

That's as far as you can evolve here!  
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Fire Pines

Exemplified by the Bishop Pine of California, Fire Pines produce sealed cones containing mature seeds.

The whole cone drops to the ground and lies there, sometimes for years.  Squirrels can't get inside, they are dry and secure, until...

Fire!

When a forest fire sweeps through an area, the cones are weakened by the intense heat.  When they cool, they open, and the seeds fall out, ready to grow in an area newly cleared of rival plants, with no predating creatures trying to eat them.

In an era when the oxygen content of the atmosphere was higher, and forest fires were regular occurrences, this adaptation must have been very successful.  Now however, forest fires are rare, and getting rarer still as humans prevent them or put them out.  Fire pines, one of the most interesting of the plant adaptations, are rare and likely to go extinct.

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Pines

Pine trees are the predominant softwood of the Northern Hemisphere, found over all continents, especially in well drained, acidic soils, to which they are better adapted than other plants.

They have no hard wood, and very sticky sap.  The sap is also... quite flammable.  At some stage in history, they must have been having a problem with forest fires, because a rather interesting adaptation turns up: sealed cones.

Close my cones and keep my seeds inside.
Let my seeds fly free

Conifers

You have evolved into the well known group of trees which produce seeds in cones (in latin, cone-bearing is 'conifer').

As ever, the drive is to become more efficient and take over more of the world.  You're already tall, producing multiple seeds from a single cone, and dropping those over the widest possible area.

There's a limit to how big and heavy a cone can grow on your branches, but increases in efficiency mean that you might be able to provide more nutrients to each cone.  As the seeds themselves are only a tiny fraction of the weight of the cone, an ideal mutation to have now would be to produce two seeds behind each scale instead of one. Each seed will be a bit smaller, which might not be helpful, but there will be twice as many.  What do you think?

Pile it high and sell it cheap.
Quality over quantity.

Gnetophytes

The development of 'vessel elements' allows you to grow longer and longer.  You don't need to have as much wood now, as you can lean on other tall plants and still pump water up.  Slowly, most varieties  lose the wood and become creepers.

In the Cretaceous era, the Gnetophytes were a wide ranging and varied group of plants which must have been worthy of several entries on their own to describe their speciation.  However, since then, they have slowly declined until now there are only a few varieties remaining.  Most are creepers in the arid parts of the Americas.  One is a tree growing in the tropics.  One is a desert plant growing in Central Africa - which only ever grows two leaves, but they are metres long.

Who can guess how they came to be so distinct?

If you can, please let me know...

Gymnosperms with pollen tubes

Instead of the pollen cell swimming to the egg, the next best thing is for the egg to reach out to the pollen. Ovule cells inside the plant are more likely to be fertilised if they are close to the surface, but this makes them exposed.  Slowly, a change evolves that delivers the best of both worlds: the ovule moves further inside, but grows behind it a tube which the pollen cell is transported down.

While we're on the subject of tubes, you're full of them: little tubes along which sap flows providing water to the leaves.  You could improve upon that though, and transport water directly.  All you need are more, smaller, tubes which will 'suck' water up via capillary action.

You'll need to grow thicker walls in some long thin cells, then when the cells die, the walls will remain, giving you tubes of lignin.

I'll take it.
No thanks.

Ginkgo

A mutation, or a series of related mutations, eventually create a very hard wood which you can use to grow very tall indeed.  Ginkgo trees can reach as high as 100m - three times the size of the average house.

Once, back in the Jurassic era, there were many varieties of Ginkgo, but in the intervening millennia they have been outcompeted by other plants and now only one species remains.  The Ginkgo tree is only found in the wild in areas of China.

That's as far as you can evolve here!  

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Cycad

The Cycads look like someone glued a large fern to the top of a palm tree trunk.  In fact, when new leaves grow, they look remarkably like ferns, as they emerge rolled up and unfurl slowly.

They have remained unchanged since the Permian era, becoming long lived plants with water storage inside their fleshy trunks which enable them to survive during dry times, and when they reproduce they can produce enormous cones, up to 300mm high, containing dozens of large seeds.  Some of them have developed a sort of tap root, and can actually be larger under the ground than above.

That's as far as you can evolve here!  

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Gymnosperms with Motile Sperm

Re-enabling the flagellum works perfectly: pollen cells land on the ovule and mature into sperm cells, growing a flagellum in the process, and then swim to the egg cell, where they fuse together and become a seed.  The seed grows on the outside of an adapted part of the plant until it falls off, and hopefully grows into a new plant.

The problem is that there are lots of other plants out there, growing tall, and crowding you out.  Your little new plants don't get enough sun and not too many of your potential offspring survive to maturity, so you need to get higher up, live for a long time, and drop as many seeds as you can.

One way to do this, is to only put your leaves and seeds at the top of the plant like a crown.  The other way is to get tough.  Attempting to do both won't work.

Crown me

Tough guy

Gymnosperms

Without insects, relying mostly on the wind, pollen are lucky to land in the right place.  This means that plants of your type will inevitably be more likely to live together in large groups, and also to grow higher and higher, in order to drop the pollen out with the greatest possible time in the wind, which provides the greatest possible range.

You slowly evolve into tall trees, existing in great forests.  Your reproductive system works under these conditions and you produce pollen cells which mature into sperm cells on arrival at the female plant.

Your ovules are as exposed as possible to maximise the chance of a pollen cell landing on an ovule.

The sperm cells will still need to migrate down into the egg cell, to complete the job.  Your cells have long since lost their flagella, as they are not needed any more, however they still carry the genes, they just never get turned on.  Perhaps it would be useful if, under these very specific circumstances, the genes for growing a flagellum turned back on?  Or you might try something else?

Tried and tested: bring back the flagellum.

Let's try something new.

Spermatophytes

You have become the first seed-bearing plant.  Instead of a simple spore, when your reproductive cells form, they are accompanied by a partner cell or cells.  These cells are filled to bursting with nutrients which will give the new plant a head start, enabling them to mature in a much wider variety of environments.

They are also of great interest to humans and other animals because they have a very high energy density and are ideal as a food source.  Many major global foods derive from collecting plant seeds in great numbers and crushing or otherwise processing them.

Possibly the weakest link in the chain of reproduction is now the provision of pollen to create sexually reproduced seeds.  You have to make a lot of pollen which is simply cast away on the wind in the hope that it will land on another plant of the same type.  While pollen cells don't cost much to produce, there must be a better way.

The world has been moving on in the last few million years.  There are now insects buzzing around.  Unlike you, they can move around and visit different plants.  Sometimes they land on two different plants of the same type and, rather obligingly, carry the pollen across.  Perhaps you could try to encourage that?

Insects are my friends

Eww.  No flies on me.

Megaphylls

As your leaves grow, they now spread and cast a much larger shadow.  They become substantially more efficient and you can carry on growing despite the continually reducing carbon dioxide levels.


Your leaves now spread and look like what we would think of as a leaf.  They are called Megaphyll leaves.


You're still reproducing by spreading spores.  Spores are tiny cells which, if they happen to land somewhere where they can start growing, will become new plants.


There is a mutation which means that spores won't be sent out into the world alone... how about if, when two cells divide and combine to create new spores, the 'spare' cells comes along for the ride?  Then it could provide an extra degree of energy stores which would give the new plant a head start, perhaps make them able to grow enough that they can become full plants even if they land in less hospitable places.


This will mean that the cost of making each potential new plant will go up - whether or not it will be successful.


What you gonna do?


Full Fat
Skinny

Club Mosses

There's no need to make big branching leaves.  There's so much carbon available in the atmosphere that all you need is a clump of leaves at the top.


Club mosses grow into huge, tall trees, dropping their simple leaves as they are shadowed by new leaves growing out from the top.  They look somewhat like modern palm trees, for the same reason: get a bunch of leaves up as high as you can and let the rest die back rather than repair any damage.
Giant club mosses form the majority of what are now called 'coal forests'.

This period is the carboniferous period.  It is the time when all the coal reserves on our planet were laid down.  Massive forests spread across the globe, far bigger than our current rain forests.  They lay down huge, deep peat bogs, which eventually form into coal as they are crushed under the weight of more and more earth.  The forests are alive with simple insects, fish and reptiles, all of which grow bigger and bigger as the air becomes enriched with oxygen, left over from the carbon-fixing carried out by the forests.

As the oxygen level rises, possibly as high as 35%, many of the insects actually grow much bigger than we currently see.  Hornets the size of your hand fly over the landscape.  But, eventually, the atmosphere runs out of carbon dioxide, at any rate in the levels needed for most of the giant club mosses.  Without a megaphyll leaf, the giant club moss species die out.


All of your giant varieties become extinct, now visible only as fossils in coal.  Only a thousand or so much smaller varieties remain extant today.

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Ferns

Ferns, far from being the woodland undergrowth plant found in temperate climates, are actually found all over the world.  They are simple, spore-reproducing plants, with efficient photosynthesising leaves which can flourish in a wide variety of places, from desert to drainage ditch.

They are remarkably tough.  They can live on ground which is unsuitable for anything else; tolerate the presence of heavy metals; endure blazing sun and the cold of the desert night.

They are an important food plant for many smaller creatures, and have survived almost unchanged from the Carboniferous period to the present.

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Moss

With no vascular system, all-over photosynthesis, and spores for reproduction, you become a small, low-rise plant, which requires a wet environment to survive.  You are a moss.

Mosses are amazing plants.  Some can withstand dessication for months and then start photosynthesising again without hours of rainfall.  Some produce scents to attract micro-insects which spread their spores. Mosses grow across the world, wherever there is (sometimes) moisture.

Spagnum moss has even managed to colonise the acidic water found over the surface of peat bogs.  In order to do this it has developed another mutation - dead cells containing water supplies.

In growing quickly, wherever there is damp, mosses have become an important part of the process of greening.  Mosses grow over newly damp ground and keep moisture in, which enables other plants to follow.

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Vascular Land Plants

The structures are a huge success!  Finally, you have the recipe for massive expansion on land!

This period of development on Earth is known as the carboniferous period.  The air is around 55% carbon dioxide.  Effectively, you have all the carbon you can fix, you can grow and grow and grow and still photosynthesise because you can provide water to the farthest sections of you.

You expand and expand and become hugely successful.  The land of the Earth becomes green for the first time.  Jungles abound, spreading almost from pole to pole.

However… (isn't there always a however..?)

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is dropping.  All of the plants of this era are changing the climate dramatically.  Within (??) million years, the carbon dioxide level has dropped to under 30%, and the least efficient collectors simply become extinct.

You need to become more efficient or it might be game over.

You currently photosynthesise all over, although more towards the tips because they get more light.  Each tip is a long thin green point with a single vascule running up the centre of it.  It's where most of your photosynthesis takes place, but it would be better if it were wider, able to collect more light.

One day, a single plant experiences a mutation which causes the vascular system to branch inside the leaf.

Will you take that mutation and have the opportunity to make larger leaves, or stick without it and make more leaves instead?

Fewer, broader, leaves
Lots of thin leaves

Apically growing land plants

This adaptation is called apical growth - the tip of each part of the plant is the only part which will continue to grow indefinitely.  It leads to long, branching structures which are well adapted for collecting as much light as possible, maximising the opportunities for photosynthesis.

However, this does lead to a problem.  Out on the land, in order to 'fix' carbon dioxide, you can't just use the gas dissolved in the water.  You aren't in the water any more.  You need to open parts of your photosynthesising structures to let the carbon dioxide in before it dissolves in your internal water, where you can use it.  But this means that you will lose water to the air through evaporation.

So far, as a small plant, it's been sufficient to allow water to migrate through you between your cells via a physical process called osmosis, in which water will migrate to the most concentrated part of the plant.

Unfortunately, osmosis is limited to fairly short distances and you have got a lot longer thanks to your apical growth adaptation.

One solution would be for some cells to reach maturity, thicken their cell walls with lignin and then die back, creating very fine tubes within you which can carry water by a combination of capillary action and osmosis.

You will sacrifice some cells, expend some energy making lignin, and be at risk of pumping any nasty chemicals throughout your system, but you will be able to photosynthesise more.

Tubes please.
No tubes.

Liverworts

You are a Liverwort.  A family of thousands of varieties of small green plants which mostly live in the wetlands of the world.

I can't find anything interesting to say about you.  Sorry!

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Land Plants

With your spores inside a small wall, you can reproduce on the drier areas of the tidal zones. This gives your offspring the opportunity to start rapidly photosynthesising as soon as they grow, and proves to be a very successful approach.

You are still a rather amorphous green plant, with most cells capable of growing and splitting if they get sufficient light input.  This means your structure becomes rather lobe-like, or blobby.

Annoyingly, this means that one lobe can shadow another lobe which is a complete waste of all the energy gone on making the lower lobe, which is now unable to collect light.  You are effectively in competition with your own body.

If you experience a mutation which turns off cell reproduction after a certain number of divisions, except for a few cells at the furthest tip of a lobe, then you will spread out further, and should be able to reduce the shadowing effect.  If you don't you will possibly spread out more widely.

Blobby?
Pointy?

Lichens

Some species of fungi will only grow to reproducing if they are in contact with a green algae.  The green algae is surrounded by the fungi, which provide it with a good environment for photosynthesis.

(The green algae can live without the fungi, but the fungi can't live without the green algae.)

What's really interesting is that some of the fungi can live with more than one variety of green algae - and will grow into different body shapes depending which algae they absorb.

We call these symbiotic systems 'Lichen'.

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Green algae

Green algae dominate the shallower seas of the world in their largest forms - green seaweed.  They are also found all over the land in moist environments.

Now, it's not quite evolution (yet) - but there are further opportunities to exploit... you can grown inside other things.

Fungi?
Coral?