FERNS

A fern is any one or more of a group of about 12,000 species of plants belonging to the botanical group known as Pteridophyta.

Unlike mosses, they have vessels for the transport of water and nutrients (xylem and phloem, making them vascular plants). They have stems, leaves, and roots like other vascular plants.

Ferns reproduce by spores and have neither seeds nor flowers.

Most ferns have what are called ‘fiddleheads’, coiled young leaves that expand into delicately divided fronds.

The life cycle of a fern includes 2 quite distinct phases; the sexual, gamete-producing phase and the asexual, spore-producing phase (the frond). The sexual phase is small and inconspicuous and depends on water (rain of dew) to enable the male sperm cells to swim to the female ones. The fertilized gamete then develops into the familiar fern plant which, when mature, produces spores on the undersides of its fronds.

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 (after flowering plants came to dominate many environments).

Source: Wikipedia