Introduction

Charles Darwin (1809–82), the greatest naturalist of all, was fascinated by them, Richard Dawkins all but ignored them. The world, it seems, is divided about the charms of the plant kingdom. The opening quotation of this chapter is from the American popular science author Tom Weller’s witty and provocative 1985 book Science made stupid, and sums up the malaise afflicting those on one side of the great divide. To these folk, plants have an unexceptional evolutionary trajectory leading up to the emergence of our modern floras and play no appreciable role in unravelling Earth’s history. Too often, this view is reiterated, reinforced, in Earth science textbooks, where it is palmed off on the unwary reader as received wisdom. Many such scholarly tomes devote a few pages to Earth’s first green spring, that decisive moment of our past when terrestrial plants turned the continents green. A few graciously give more space—an entire chapter, perhaps—to the progression of plants up the evolutionary ladder from their earliest beginnings through to the appearance of the first forests, the emergence of seed plants, and the blooming of the Earth with the rise of flowering plants. Fewer still recognize plants as important players in the game of life. In this book I argue that Weller’s viewpoint, and the conventional view of textbooks, is now outdated, redundant even, and misguided. The scientific investigation of fossil plants is on the threshold of an exciting new era, a grand synthesis illuminating new chapters in the inseparable stories of plant evolution and Earth’s environmental history. This book is about that new science. It is an endeavour that has emerged unnoticed in the last two decades but which is proving a powerful tool for clearing a path through the dense, sterile thicket of entrenched orthodoxy. It advocates fossils not as the disarticulated remains of ancient plant life gathering dust deep within the basements of museums, but as exciting, dynamic entities brought to life in new ways by the scientific investigation of their living counterparts. The Emerald planet is not a textbook, nor an attempt at describing, blow-by-blow, the detailed evolutionary history of plant life over the ages in a manner accessible to the general reader.