That's pretty creepy - Devonian lycophyte

TPP taught plant diversity/plant morphology for many years and always loved to have the excuse to rummage through the paleobotanical literature.  Back in the Devonian, that little ole era when plants really colonized the land, things were really pretty different.  This reconstruction of a plant called Sengelia, not just of a piece but of a whole plant gives a very different perspective on early land plants.  Some parts of this lycophyte (clubmoss) are quite expected, for example,  the plant is mostly stems and stem-like roots; they branch dichotomously (equal forking at the apex), the stem is covered with enations, little outgrowths, but not leaves.  What us a surprise is that the authors interpret their fossils to growing prostrately, creeping along the land surface.  Not sure how they decided it wasn't a weakish more erect plant that got pushed over by water, flooding that produced the fossils, but Alexandru Tomescu is a careful researcher.  Knocked over plants also tend to have their stem tips turn up a bit at the ends as they try to grow upward again. Without taller plants to compete with, a sprawling, prostrate plant will do fine on often flooded sediments.  Here's the full citation: Matsunaga, K. K. S., & Tomescu, A. M. F. (2017). An organismal concept for Sengelia radicans gen. et sp. nov. – morphology and natural history of an Early Devonian lycophyte. Annals of Botany, 119(7), 1097–1113. 

Fun with google

Botanists end up searching the web for some pretty esoteric  items, certainly not the mainstream of web use, so in the totality of their helpfulness, search engines deliver some odd items from time to time.  It's almost as if they were right out of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, where some helpful cybernetics delivers you what it thinks you want.  My first really funny results involved a search for holly just using the common name rather than the genus Ilex.  Now that was just a dumb thing to do.  But today the Phactor was interested in the Devonian fossil plant named Horneophyton.  Now how can this go wrong?  Ah, but maybe your Engrish isn't so good, so the cybernetics decides to try to sort out some character strings.  Ah, you horneo (horny old?), guy?  Maybe you need some help?  But this did come as a complete surprise.  Sort of stands out among the humdrum of regular old paleobotany illustrations.  So the old search engine certainly covered all its bases, giving me everything that could conceivably be found under that heading.  How funny.  Here's two images, you decide which one the Phactor was looking for and which was the surprise.  Ah, both do exhibit some dichotomous axes. 

Plant of the week (eon?) - Cooksonia

This picture of Cooksonia is pretty remarkable. Not so much for displaying this plant's simple beauty, not even because the picture is actually in focus, but because this plant has been extinct since the Devonian some 380 million years ago.

This fossil is looking particularly good because it is a model on display in the Darwin House at the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew.

Cooksonia is significant because this is the first land plant sporophyte to show apical branching. As the axes grew, the apex divides into two equal axes, a type of branching called dichotomous. Fossils show axes of Cooksonia branching thusly 1 to 4 times. Each axis then terminating with a sporangium. This appears to be a way of getting the maximum number of dispersable offspring from a single fertilization event.

Cooksonia is also significant because at the time this was the tallest plant of its day. These axes towered some 5 centimeters (nearly 2 inches) above the substrate. It is also the earliest appearing plant to have vascular tissue, xylem, although the oldest specimens found in Silurian sediments may not have possessed true xylem.

This plant is the first step on the way to trees, and it did not really take too long for the first trees and forests to appear (near the end of the Devonian).