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If you could travel in a time machine to the period of Earth's history when plants began to appear, you would see which plant evolve after the liverworts?

a) Hornworts
b) Mosses
c) Ferns

1 Answer

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Final answer:

Mosses evolved after liverworts in the progression of nonvascular plant evolution, with liverworts being the earliest land plants and mosses being closer relatives to vascular plants. Ferns evolved later as part of the vascular plant lineage.The correct option is B.

Step-by-step explanation:

If you could travel in a time machine to the period of Earth's history when plants began to appear, you would see mosses evolve after the liverworts.

The evolution of nonvascular plants began with the liverworts, followed by the hornworts, and mosses evolved last. Liverworts are considered to be most closely related to the ancestral plants that first colonized land.

Furthermore, mosses, as part of the bryophytes, are most similar to vascular plants, indicating that they share a more recent common ancestor with those plants.

Comparatively, fern evolution followed the bryophytes and is part of the vascular plant lineage, developing alongside horsetails and seed plants to form the early forests of the Devonian period.

These larger, more complex plants required moist environments for their reproductive processes, as they depended on water for the transport of sperm to reach the ovum.The correct option is B.

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