The weather is very hot.
The temperature is scorching. ogs that are constantly shifting and changing
It’s hard to believe, but before plants evolved, Earth looked like a desolate wasteland. But over the course of a few billion years, plants became what they are today and we’re sure glad they did! But how did the world go from a desolate wasteland to a plant-filled wonderland? It’s a complicated tale that involves an interesting snack.
It all started about 1.5 billion years ago when life consisted of single-celled organisms that mostly kept to the water. Some of these cells were simple like modern day bacteria, while others had evolved some complexity and organized their insides into compartments called organelles. Imagine one of these more complex single-celled organisms being hungry and then encountering a little aquatic microbe called a cyanobacterium. This cyanobacterium had the ability to do photosynthesis, or turn carbon dioxide gas into sugary food. The single-celled organism then engulfed the cyanobacterium, and instead of bursting the bubble to digest it, something weird happened: the cyanobacterium just hung out inside the single-celled organism and kept photosynthesizing, providing it with a steady supply of sugar. This kicked off a series of events that would lead to the evolution of all the plants on Earth.
We know this happened because of similarities between chloroplasts and bacteria’s DNA, as well as chloroplasts having two membranes which supports the theory that they were once engulfed by a larger cell. Evolution involves change occurring over time, and it happens because of tiny genetic cogs that are constantly shifting and changing. In a population of organisms, genes act like an instruction manual, telling them how to be. Each gene can come in different flavors called alleles, and many plants inherit one allele from each parent. Alleles interact to produce traits, and if a population of organisms has a certain allele frequency, evolution is simply the change in that allele frequency over time. Eventually, a population of organisms might even diverge into a number of different species.