How did plants colonize and transform the planet, in barely 500 million years?

What did the first plants look like? What happened during the hundreds of millions of years between the appearance of plants and the blooming of the first flowers? What became of them? What can today’s plants teach us about how extinct plants functioned? These are some of the major questions explored in this book, which aims not so much to recount the long history of plant diversification as to explain how, thanks to scientific methods and experimentation, it is possible to trace that story back through time.