{"id":102829,"date":"2020-02-25T10:44:02","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T18:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/billion-year-old-green-algae-is-an-ancestor-of-all-plants-on-earth"},"modified":"2020-02-25T10:44:02","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T18:44:02","slug":"billion-year-old-green-algae-is-an-ancestor-of-all-plants-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/billion-year-old-green-algae-is-an-ancestor-of-all-plants-on-earth","title":{"rendered":"Billion-year-old green algae is an ancestor of all plants on Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/billion-year-old-green-algae-is-an-ancestor-of-all-plants-on-earth2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Life on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/19102-amazing-facts-earth.html\">Earth<\/a> is dependent on photosynthesizing plants and algae for food, yet land plants did not evolve until about 450 million years ago, Tang said. \u201cThe new fossil suggests that green seaweeds were important players in the ocean long before their descendants, land plants, took control,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>These fossils came from an ancient ocean, but there is still a debate about where green algae originated. \u201cNot everyone agrees with us; some scientists think that green plants started in rivers and lakes, and then conquered the ocean and land later,\u201d Xiao <a href=\"https:\/\/vtnews.vt.edu\/articles\/2020\/02\/science-billion_year_old_seaweed.html\">said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, green algae isn\u2019t the oldest algae on record. \u201cThere is strong fossil evidence that red algae existed over a billion years ago, and we know the red and green algae diverged from a common ancestor,\u201d Gibson told Live Science in an email. \u201cSo, although this doesn\u2019t fundamentally change the way I\u2019ll think about the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/474-controversy-evolution-works.html\">evolution<\/a> of life, the discovery of this green algal fossil helps fill an important gap and strengthens an emerging timeline for the evolution of early, complex life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Life on Earth is dependent on photosynthesizing plants and algae for food, yet land plants did not evolve until about 450 million years ago, Tang said. \u201cThe new fossil suggests that green seaweeds were important players in the ocean long before their descendants, land plants, took control,\u201d he said. These fossils came from an ancient [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,1506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}