Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group A five-year
effort to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships among all
green plants has resulted in the most complete "tree of life" of
any group of living things on the planet, The up-to-date family
tree has revealed several surprises about the evolution of green
plants, such as how they emerged from the sea onto land and how
they are related to the four other major kingdoms: the brown
plants, the red plants, the fungi and the animals. Specifically,
the team has overturned the traditional belief that the so-
called "land-plant invasion" was led by seawater plants.
Instead, the research team has found that primitive freshwater
plants provided the ancestral stock from which all green plants
now on land are descended, and that this ancestor spawned every
green plant now alive on earth. This knowledge will help
scientists in a broad range of disciplines, from those trying to
develop new and better crops to those prospecting for new
medicines. (exerpt from Univ