Page:Creation by Evolution (1928).djvu/204

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CREATION BY EVOLUTION

graphically, is a plant (Archaeopteris) whose classific place is uncertain, for we cannot yet be sure whether it is a true fern or a seed fern.

Fig. 2.—Restoration of Psilophyton, an early Devonian terrestrial plant showing many features suggestive of algal ancestry.

During the remainder of Palaeozoic time the terrestrial vegetation consisted essentially of the coal plants—club mosses as large as trees, with woody stems and complex reproductive structure, tree-like horsetails, a great variety of seed ferns, some ancestral to the later cycads, and trees like the modern ginkgo. The most abundant of the latter were tall trees, somewhat like modern conifers but with a larger pith in the columnar trunk and large leaves like those of a corn plant. These had

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