Drat, more revisions!

One of the horrible, terrible, very-bad, no-good things about writing a book is that the scientific publishing never stops, and it takes a lot longer to get a book published than to get a scientific paper published, although sometimes it doesn't seem so.  So what you really, really hate is when while putting the finishing touches on a book manuscript an article gets published that you now must, yes, must, incorporate into your book, and so it is that an otherwise nice morning scan through a bunch of science blogs results in annoyance.  So here's the short version, because the long version isn't available to you.  Most of these findings are not really a surprise, more of a confirmation of what was known, but very nicely summarized in terms of character evolution.  Hornworts have the most ancient common ancestry with the rest of land plants.  Sporophytes invented stomates, once it would seem.  and the innovation of apical growth and apical branching produced sporophytes with 2 or more sporangia on bigger sporophytes, and then plants really got a lot bigger.  It would appear that this study will provide some conclusions that are more specific than previous studies.  Otherwise the Phactor had it pretty much right about what led to vascular land plants.