TIL that ferns have been around longer than flowering plants, way longer

I was reading an old field guide from 1987 that my dad left me, and it said ferns first showed up about 360 million years ago. That's before dinosaurs, before bees, before basically everything I assumed was ancient. I always figured flowers were the original big deal in botany, but nope, ferns were quietly doing their thing for over 200 million years before the first flower even opened. It makes me look at the fiddleheads in my backyard completely different. Has anyone else stumbled on a fact like that that just rewired how you see a common plant?

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nora_barnes9d agoMost Upvoted

Wait til you look up moss, it beat ferns by like 100 million years!