File:Baragwanathia fossil land plant (Lower Devonian; Victoria, southeastern Australia) (15334925217).jpg

Baragwanathia fossil land plant from the Lower Devonian of Victoria, southeastern Australia. (public display, FMNH PP48927, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA)

Plants are multicellular, photosynthetic eucaryotes. The oldest known land plant body fossils are Silurian in age. Fossil root traces of land plants are known back in the Ordovician. The Devonian was the key time interval during which land plants flourished and Earth experienced its first “greening” of the land. The earliest land plants were small and simple and probably remained close to bodies of water. By the Late Devonian, land plants had evolved large, tree-sized bodies and the first-ever forests appeared.

Baragwanathia is the oldest known lycopod plant and one of the oldest known land plant body fossils. Lycopods are an important and well known component of the Paleozoic land plant fossil record. Baragwanathia has been reported from the Upper Silurian to Middle Devonian of Australia and Canada, principally as impressions and carbonized compressions, but some specimens are permineralized. Baragwanathia was a decent-sized plant, with upright axes (stems) up to 7 cm wide, but did not get too big - it was a herbaceous plant that probably stood less than ~1 m high. Numerous elongated leaves (microphylls) attached to the axis in a helical pattern. Individual leaves reached up to 4 cm long.