420 mya Plant Fossils Found 800 Miles From North Pole

[Richard W Travsky <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/06/020607072227.htm

CHAPEL HILL  Along with Canadian colleagues, a University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill scientist has discovered fossils of plants dating
back some 420 million years.

The discovery, made on Bathurst Island in the Northwest Territories about
800 miles from the North Pole, shows vascular plants were more complex at
that time than paleontologists previously believed and is significant for
that reason, the UNC researcher said.

These are not the earliest vascular plants ever found, but they are the
earliest ever found of this size, complexity and degree of
diversification, said Dr. Patricia G. Gensel, professor of biology at UNC.
They look something like medium-sized grasses, except that they branch. 
...
A report about the findings appears in the June issue of the American
Journal of Botany. Besides Gensel, authors are UNC graduate student
Michele E. Kotyk, Dr. James F. Basinger, professor of geology at the
University of Saskatchewan, and Dr. Tim A. de Freitas, a Calgary, Canada
geologist working for Nexen Inc.

Bits and pieces of the earliest known land plants date back almost 500
million years to the Ordovician Period, and their fragmentary remains
indicate the plants were related to liverworts that exist today, Gensel
said. The earliest vascular plants -- ones with water-conducting tissues
-- so far are known to date back about 425 million years. Sparsely
branched, they were about an eighth of an inch tall and grew a few
reproductive bodies known as sporangia on their branches.

By contrast, the new plants, which lived only a few million years later,
would have stood four or more inches tall, bore many branches with dense
rows of sporangia and probably grew in clusters, she said. They more
closely resembled much younger early Devonian plants from about 390
million years ago than any other Silurian forms. 



and speaking of plants:

http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/02/pr0251.htm

Botanists Discover New Conifer Species in Vietnam

An unusual conifer found in a remote area of northern Vietnam has been
identified as a genus and species previously unknown to science.