570 vanished lives

121Paleozoic

Leafless stems only centimeters tall held spore capsules at their tips, marking an early step inland.

122Paleozoic

Naked upright axes rose from creeping rhizomes, preserved cell by cell by silica-rich hot springs.

123Paleozoic

It grew true wood and a tree crown but still reproduced by spores, helping create Earth's first broad forests.

124Paleozoic

A straight trunk patterned with diamond leaf scars forked only high above the Carboniferous mire.

125Paleozoic

Casts of jointed stems record large horsetail relatives; Calamites suckowii does not automatically name a plant with all organs known.

126Paleozoic

Woody stems carried immense fernlike fronds, yet seeds grew among the foliage of this vanished seed fern.

127Paleozoic

Tongue-shaped leaves across the southern continents became important evidence that Gondwana was once united.

128Mesozoic

Flower-like reproductive organs nestled among cycad-like leaves, but this bennettitalean was not a flowering plant.

129Mesozoic

Long leaves divided into broad segments formed part of the cycadophyte layer beneath Jurassic trees.

130Mesozoic

What looked like one trunk was a false stem woven from many small axes and adventitious roots.

131Mesozoic

Elongated aquatic stems bore petal-less reproductive structures important to debates about early flowering plants.

132Mesozoic

Curved cupules containing ovules hung beneath compound leaves in this puzzling seed plant.

133Recently extinct

It was not a true olive; the last wild tree died in 1994 and its last cultivated descendant in 2003.

134Recently extinct

Demand for fragrant wood reduced this island tree to a final individual recorded in 1908.

135Recently extinct

Pink-purple pea flowers once carried this monotypic island plant into European glasshouses.

136Recently extinct

This violet occupied one small patch of pale limestone before quarrying removed its habitat.

141Paleozoic

Leafless axes rose in stands from creeping stems; conducting cells were present, but true vascular tissue was not.

142Paleozoic

Short axes carried forked sporangia above corm-like bases that could resprout on a repeatedly flooded hot-spring surface.

143Paleozoic

Veinless leaf-like flaps covered its axes, while star-shaped xylem supplied shoots that rose nearly half a meter.

144Paleozoic

Branches more than a meter long carried dense narrow microphylls, far more elaborate than most naked-stemmed plants of its age.

145Paleozoic

Naked axes forked repeatedly, their fertile tips curling inward and carrying paired elongated sporangia.

146Paleozoic

Two rows of kidney-shaped sporangia lined curved branch tips like the teeth of an unfinished botanical zipper.

147Paleozoic

Vertical rows of leaf scars stamped the tall trunk, beneath a crown of sparse branches and grasslike microphylls.

148Paleozoic

Rounded pinnules carried fanlike veins and looked fernlike, yet immense seeds grew among the fronds.