... two centuries, however the contributions of Linnaeus in 1753 laid a sound foundation for future study of the subject. Morphological data has been accumulating steadily for the past 250 years, but for the first 100 it mainly concerned the question of taxonomy. Dawson initiated a more important question regarding the "roots" of relationships between plants in 1859. Dawson described several early Devonian plants from Canada and Scotland and interpreted these early fossils as primitive vascular plants showing a degree of morphological simplicity unknown in extant groups. This began to give hints at the evolution of land plants, but the first detailed evidence was provided by Bowers' work on the anatomy of primitive Pteridophytes in Rhynie Chert in 1920. This bridged the diversity between the bryophytes and the Tracheophytes and gave rise to the creation of a monophyletic hypothesis for the evolution of land plants. Up until the 80's studies of ...

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