Cryptospores and the Origin of Land Plants

Recent Research

May 18, 2026: A video has been posted of my TMS palynology lecture series talk, entitled, "Cryptospores and the algal plant transition". This an hour-long presentation summarizes my take on the rôle of fossil cryptospores and an evo-devo approach to understanding the origin of land plants.

This chart is an attempt to quantify the distribution of lower Paleozoic cryptospores. The clade width is based on species counts from a set of 28 systematic papers. Greyed boxes are no data in the Floian or a single noticable outlier in the Sandbanian trilete record. 

Strother, P.K. & W.A. Taylor. 2024. A Fossil Record of Spores before Sporophytes. Diversity 2024, 16, 428. https://doi.org/10.3390/d16070428

Taylor, W.A. & Paul K. Strother. 2024. Plant evolution: A tapetum is now effectively found in all plant lineages. Current Biology, 34 (4) PR146-R148.

Strother, P.K. 2023. An evo-devo perspective on no Ordovician land plants. Estonian Journal of Earth Sciences 2023, 72, 1, 102–105  https://doi.org/10.3176/earth.2023.31

McCourt, Richard M., Louise A. Lewis, Paul K. Strother, Charles F. Delwiche, Norman J. Wickett, Jan de Vries & John L. Bowman. 2023. Green land: multiple perspectives on green algal evolution and the earliest land plants. American Journal of Botany. Doi:10.1002/ajb2.16175

Strother, Paul K. & Clinton Foster. 2021. A fossil record of land plant origins from charophyte algae. Science 373 (6556), 792-796. doi: 10.1126/science.abj2927