Fern plants

Friday, July 6, 2012

Fern plants

Ferns are plants belonging to the botanical group known as Pteridophyta. They have stems, leaves, and roots like other vascular plants. Ferns reproduce via spores and have neither seeds nor flowers. Ferns first appear in the fossil record 360 million years ago in the Carboniferous but many of the current families and species did not appear until roughly 145 million years ago in the early Cretaceous.

By far the largest group of ferns are the leptosporangiate ferns, but ferns as defined here (also called monilophytes) include horsetails, whisk ferns, marattioid ferns, and ophioglossoid ferns. The term pteridophyte also refers to ferns and a few other seedless vascular plants.
Ferns are not of major economic importance, but some are grown or gathered for food, as ornamental plants, for remediating contaminated soils, and have been the subject of research for their ability to remove some chemical pollutants from the air.