§ 33. Exit of amphibians to land The most likely biotope of transition from water to land for lobe-fins was coastal water-air labyrinths (Fig. II-32; II-33). They contained both sea water and fresh water flowing from the shore, numerous half-filled air and water

Coming out of hibernation With the onset of spring, which is associated with warming and increasing duration daylight hours, hibernating mammals come out of a state of torpor, i.e., “awaken.” It is obvious that the increase in body temperature upon awakening

12.3. The way out of the crisis is the transition to the noosphere. The central theme of the doctrine of the noosphere is the unity of the biosphere and humanity. V.I. Vernadsky in his works reveals the roots of this unity, the importance of the organization of the biosphere in the development of mankind. This allows you to understand

But, perhaps, an equally important event should be considered the appearance on Earth of land organisms and, above all, land plants. When, how and why did this happen?

In the first half of the Paleozoic era, there were three large continents on Earth. Their outlines were very far from modern ones. The huge continent stretched in the northern half of the globe from the middle of modern North America to the Urals. To the east of it there was another, smaller continent. It occupied the territory of Eastern Siberia, the Far East, part of China and Mongolia. In the south, from South America through Africa to Australia, the third continent stretched - Gondwana.

The climate was warm almost everywhere. The continents had a flat, uniform topography. Therefore, the waters of the oceans often flooded the land, forming shallow seas, which often became shallow, dried up, and then filled with water again. Thus, nature itself seemed to force some types of aquatic plants - green algae - to adapt to life outside of water. During periods of shallow waters and droughts, some of them survived. Obviously, mainly those whose roots had developed better by that time. Millennia passed, and plants gradually settled in the coastal strip of land, giving rise to the terrestrial plant world.

The first sushi plants were very small, only about a quarter of a meter high, and had a poorly developed root system. They were called "psilophytes", that is, "naked" or "bald", since they did not have leaves. From psilophytes arose horsetail, clubmoss and fern-like plants.

Research by Soviet scientists A. N. Krishtofovich and S. N. Naumova established that the settlement of land by plants occurred more than four hundred million years ago.

Following the plants, animals began to move to land - first invertebrates, and then vertebrates. The first to emerge from the water were, apparently, annelids (the ancestors of modern earthworms), mollusks, as well as the ancestors of spiders and insects, which already breathed through trachea - a complex system of tubes that penetrate the body. Some invertebrates of that time, such as crustaceans, reached a length of three meters.

The second half of the era of ancient life, which began about three hundred and twenty million years ago, includes the Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian periods. It lasted approximately one hundred and thirty-five million years. It was an eventful time in the history of life on Earth. Living creatures that emerged from the water then spread widely over land, giving rise to numerous and diverse terrestrial organisms.

In the middle of the era of ancient life on the border of the Silurian and Devonian periods, our Earth underwent great changes. In several places the earth's crust rose. Significant areas of the seabed were exposed to water, which led to the expansion of land. Ancient mountains were formed in Scandinavia, Greenland, Ireland, North Africa, and Siberia. Naturally, all these changes greatly influenced the development of life. Finding themselves far from water, the first land plants adapted to existence on land. Under the new conditions, plants could better absorb the energy of sunlight, photosynthesis and the release of oxygen in the atmosphere increased. Moss-like psilophytes, and later lycophytes, horsetails and fern-like plants, spreading into the interior of the continents, spread out into dense forests. This was facilitated by the damp and warm, greenhouse-like climate of continuous summer. The ancient forests were majestic and gloomy. Giant tree-like horsetails and mosses, reaching thirty meters in height, stood close to each other. The undergrowth consisted of small horsetails, ferns and the ancestors of conifers that arose from them - gymnosperms. From the accumulations of the remains of ancient vegetation in the layers of the earth's crust, powerful deposits were subsequently formed coal, for example in the Donbass, the Moscow region, the Urals and other places. It is not for nothing that one of the periods of this time is called Carboniferous.

Representatives of the animal world developed no less intensively at this time. The changing conditions led primarily to the fact that some ancient invertebrates began to die out. Archaeocyaths disappeared, trilobites, ancient corals and others almost became extinct. But they were replaced by organisms that were more adapted to the new conditions. New forms of mollusks and echinoderms emerged.

The rapid spread of terrestrial vegetation increased the amount of oxygen in the air, promoting the formation of rich nutrients soils, especially in forests. It is not surprising that relatively soon life in the forests was already in full swing. Various centipedes and their descendants appeared there - ancient insects: cockroaches, grasshoppers. Then the first flying animals appeared. These were mayflies and dragonflies. By flying, they could see food better and approach it faster. Some dragonflies of that time were different large sizes. Their wingspan reached seventy-five centimeters.

How did life at sea develop at this time?

Already in the Devonian period, fish became widespread and changed greatly. Some of them developed bones in their skin and formed a shell. Naturally, such “armored” fish could not swim quickly and therefore mostly lay on the bottom of bays and lagoons. Due to their sedentary lifestyle, they were unable to develop further. The shallowing of the reservoir led to the massive death of armored fish, and they soon became extinct.

A different fate awaited other fish that lived in those days - the so-called lungfishes and lobe-finned fish. They had short fleshy fins - two pectoral and two abdominal. With the help of these fins, they swam and could also crawl along the bottom of reservoirs. But the main difference between such fish is their ability to exist out of water, since their thick skin retained moisture. These adaptations of lungfish and lobe-finned fish allowed them to live in bodies of water that periodically became very shallow and even dried out.

Ichthyostega - the oldest terrestrial vertebrate

It's interesting to note that lungfish exists even today. They live in the rivers of Australia, Africa and South America that dry up in summer. More recently, lobe-finned fish have been caught in Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa.

How did these fish breathe out of water? In the hot summer, their gills were tightly covered with gill covers and a swim bladder with highly branched blood vessels was used for breathing.

In those places where reservoirs became shallow and dried up especially often, fish’s adaptations to life outside of water became more and more improved. The paired fins turned into paws, the gills with which the fish breathed in the water became smaller, and the swim bladder became more complex, grew and gradually turned into lungs with which one could breathe on land; The sense organs necessary for life on land also developed. This is how fish transformed into amphibious vertebrates. At the same time, the fins of lobe-finned fish also changed. They became more and more comfortable for crawling and gradually turned into paws.

Recently, paleontologists managed to discover very interesting fossils. These new discoveries help shed light on the earliest stages of the transformation of fish into land animals. In the sedimentary rocks of Greenland, scientists have found the remains of four-legged animals, the so-called Ichthyostega. Their short, five-fingered paws looked more like fins or flippers, and their body was covered with small scales. Finally, the skull and vertebral column of Ichthyostegus are very similar to the skull and vertebral column of lobe-finned fishes. There is no doubt that ichthyostegas originated from lobe-finned fish.

This, in brief, is the history of the origin of the first four-legged animals that breathed with lungs, the history of a process that lasted millions of years and ended about three hundred million years ago.

The first four-legged vertebrates were amphibians and were called stegocephalians. Although they left the water, they could not spread overland into the interior of the continents, since they continued to spawn in the water. The juveniles developed there, where they obtained food for themselves, hunting for fish and various aquatic animals. In their lifestyle, they were similar to their close descendants - the modern newts and frogs familiar to us. Stegocephalians were very diverse, ranging from a few centimeters to several meters in length. Stegocephals became especially widespread during the Carboniferous period, whose warm and humid climate favored their development.

End Carboniferous period was marked by new strong geological changes in the earth's crust. At that time, the rise of the land began again, and the mountains of the Urals, Altai, and Tien Shan appeared. The redistribution of land and sea changed the climate. And it is quite natural that in the subsequent, so-called Permian period, huge swampy forests disappeared, ancient amphibians began to die out, and at the same time new plants and animals appeared, adapted to a cooler and drier climate.

Here, first of all, it is necessary to note the development of coniferous plants, as well as reptiles, which originated from some groups of ancient amphibians. Reptiles, which include living crocodiles, turtles, lizards and snakes, differ from amphibians in that they do not spawn in water, but lay their eggs on land. Their scaly or horny skin protects the body well from moisture loss. These and other features of reptiles helped them quickly spread on land at the end of the Paleozoic era.

The found remains of small animals with characteristics of both amphibians and reptiles helped to present a picture of the origin of reptiles. These are Seymuria discovered in North America, Lantnosuchus and Cotlassia in our country. For a long time there was a debate in science: which class should these animals belong to? Soviet paleontologist Professor I.A. Efremov managed to prove that they are all representatives of an intermediate group of animals that seem to stand between amphibians and reptiles. Efremov called them batrachosaurs, that is, frog-lizards.

Many remains of ancient reptiles have been found in our country. The richest collection of them - one of the best in the world - was collected on the Northern Dvina by the Russian paleontologist Vladimir Prokhorovich Amalitsky.

At the end of the Permian period, that is, about two hundred million years ago, there was another big river. In the sands, silts and clays that it deposited, the skeletons of amphibians, reptiles, and the remains of ferns were buried. Many years of research by our scientist made it possible to quite completely restore ancient look the region where the Northern Dvina now flows.

We see the shore big river, densely overgrown with horsetails, conifers, and ferns. Various reptiles live along the banks. Among them are large, up to three meters in length, hippopotamus-like pareiasaurs that ate plant foods. Their massive body is covered with bony scutes, and their short paws have blunt claws. A little further from the river live predatory reptiles. Attracting attention are the large animal-like Inostrantsevia, named after the Russian geologist A. A. Inostrantsev. They have a long, narrow body and dagger-shaped teeth protruding from their mouths. Long paws are armed with sharp claws. But here are small reptiles similar to foreigners. They already have features inherent in animals or mammals. The molars became multitubercular; These teeth are comfortable to chew on. The paws have become very similar to the paws of modern animals. It was not for nothing that these animals were called beast-like reptiles; it was from them that animals later evolved. There is no fantasy in the picture painted here. For a paleontologist, this is the same reality as the fact that spruce and pine trees now grow in the Northern Dvina basin, squirrels and bears, wolves and foxes live.

So, during the era of ancient life, plants and animals finally spread over the entire surface of the land, adapting to a wide variety of living conditions. Then the era begins average life- Mesozoic - era further development wildlife on our planet.

Chapter 8. Early Paleozoic: “exit of life to land.” The appearance of soils and soil formers. Higher plants and their environment-forming role. Tetrapodization of lobe-finned fishes

Until very recently, people learned from a school biology textbook and popular books on the theory of evolution this approximately picture of an event usually called the “Exit of life to land.” At the beginning of the Devonian period (or at the end of the Silurian), thickets of the first terrestrial plants - psilophytes (Figure 29, a) appeared on the shores of the seas (more precisely, sea lagoons), the position of which in the system of the plant kingdom remains not entirely clear. Vegetation made it possible for invertebrate animals to appear on land - centipedes, arachnids and insects; invertebrates, in turn, created a food base for terrestrial vertebrates - the first amphibians (descending from lobe-finned fish) - such as ichthyostega (Figure 29, b). Terrestrial life in those days occupied only an extremely narrow coastal strip, beyond which stretched vast expanses of absolutely lifeless primary deserts.

So, according to modern ideas, almost everything in this picture is incorrect (or at least inaccurate) - starting with the fact that sufficiently developed terrestrial life reliably existed much earlier (already in the Ordovician period following the Cambrian), and ending with , that the mentioned “first amphibians” were probably purely aquatic creatures that had no connection with land. The point, however, is not even in these particulars (we will talk about them in our turn). Another thing is more important: most likely, the formulation itself is fundamentally incorrect - “Exit of living organisms to land.” There are serious reasons to believe that land landscapes of the modern appearance were completely absent in those days, and living organisms not only came to land, but in a sense created it as such. However, let's take it in order.

So the first question is when; When did the first undoubtedly terrestrial organisms and ecosystems appear on Earth? However, here a counter question immediately arises: how can we determine that a certain extinct organism that we encountered is terrestrial? This is not at all as simple as it seems at first glance, because the principle of actualism here will work with serious malfunctions. A typical example: starting from the middle of the Silurian period, scorpions appear in the fossil record - animals that seem to be purely land animals in modern times. However, it is now quite firmly established that Paleozoic scorpions breathed with gills and led an aquatic (or at least amphibiotic) lifestyle; terrestrial representatives of the order, whose gills are transformed into “book-lungs” characteristic of arachnids, appeared only at the beginning of the Mesozoic. Consequently, finds of scorpions in Silurian deposits in themselves do not prove anything (in the sense of interest to us).

It seems more productive here to track the appearance in the chronicle not of terrestrial (in modern times) groups of animals and plants, but of certain anatomical signs of “landness”. So, for example, a plant cuticle with stomata and the remains of conducting tissues - tracheids must surely belong to terrestrial plants: under water, as you might guess, both stomata and conducting vessels are useless... However, there is another - truly wonderful! - integral indicator of existence in given time terrestrial life. Just as free oxygen is an indicator of the existence of photosynthetic organisms on the planet, soil can serve as an indicator of the existence of terrestrial ecosystems: the process of soil formation occurs only on land, and fossil soils (paleosols) are clearly distinguishable in structure from any type of bottom sediments.

It should be noted that soil is not preserved in a fossil state very often; Only in recent decades have paleosols stopped being looked at as some kind of exotic curiosity and their systematic study began. As a result, in the study of ancient weathering crusts (and soil is nothing more than a biogenic weathering crust), a genuine revolution took place, literally upending previous ideas about life on land. The most ancient paleosols were found in the deep Precambrian - early Proterozoic; in one of them, 2.4 billion years old, S. Campbell (1985) discovered undoubted traces of the vital activity of photosynthetic organisms - carbon with a shifted isotope ratio of 12 C / 13 C. In this regard, we can mention the recently discovered remains of cyanobacterial buildings in Proterozoic karst cavities: karst processes - the formation of basins and caves in water-soluble sedimentary rocks (limestones, gypsum) - can only occur on land.

Another fundamental discovery in this area should be considered the discovery by G. Retallak (1985) in Ordovician paleosols of vertical burrows dug by some fairly large animals - apparently arthropods or oligochaetes (earthworms); in these soils there are no roots (which are usually very well preserved), but there are peculiar tubular bodies - Retallak interprets them as the remains of non-vascular plants and/or terrestrial green algae. In somewhat later, Silurian, paleosols, coprolites (fossilized excrement) of some soil-dwelling animals were found; Their food, apparently, was the hyphae of fungi, which make up a significant portion of the substance of coprolites (however, it is possible that fungi could have developed secondarily on organic matter contained in coprolites).

So, by now two facts can be considered quite firmly established:

1. Life appeared on land a very long time ago, in the middle Precambrian. Apparently it was presented various options algal crusts (including amphibiotic mats) and, possibly, lichens; all of them could carry out the processes of archaic soil formation.

2. Animals (invertebrates) existed on land at least since the Ordovician, i.e. long before the appearance higher vegetation(whose reliable traces still remain unknown until the Late Silurian). The algal crusts mentioned above could serve as habitat and food for these invertebrates; at the same time, the animals themselves inevitably became a powerful soil-forming factor.

The latter circumstance makes us recall an old discussion - about two possible ways colonization of land by invertebrates. The fact is that non-marine fossils of this age were very rare, and all hypotheses on this subject seemed only more or less convincing speculations, not subject to real verification. Some researchers assumed that the animals came out of the sea directly - through the littoral zone with algal discharges and other shelters; others insisted that freshwater bodies of water were settled first, and only from this “bridgehead” did the “offensive” on land subsequently begin. Among the supporters of the first point of view, M.S.’s constructions stood out for their persuasiveness. Gilyarov (1947), who, based on a comparative analysis of the adaptations of modern soil-dwelling animals, argued that it was the soil that should have served as the primary habitat of the earliest inhabitants of the land. It should be taken into account that the soil fauna is really very poorly included in the paleontological record and the absence of fossil “documents” here is quite understandable. These constructions, however, had one truly vulnerable point: where did this soil itself come from, if in those days there was no terrestrial vegetation yet? Everyone knows that soil formation occurs with the participation of higher plants - Gilyarov himself called real soils only those associated with the rhizosphere, and everything else - weathering crusts... However, now - when it has become known that primitive soil formation is possible with the participation of only lower plants - Gilyarov’s concept gained a “second wind”, and was recently directly confirmed by Retallak’s data on Ordovician paleosols.

On the other hand, undoubted freshwater faunas (which contain, among other things, tracks of traces on the surface of the sediment) appear much later - in the Devonian. They include scorpions, small (about palm-sized) crustacean scorpions, fish and the first non-marine mollusks; Among the mollusks there are also bivalves - long-living organisms that are unable to tolerate death and drying out of water bodies. Faunas with such indisputably soil animals as trigonotarbs (“shell spiders”) and herbivorous bipedal centipedes already existed in the Silurian (Ludlovian age). And since aquatic fauna always ends up in burials an order of magnitude better than terrestrial fauna, all this allows us to draw another conclusion:

3. Soil fauna appeared significantly earlier than freshwater fauna. That is - at least for animals fresh waters could not play the role of a “springboard” in the conquest of land.

This conclusion, however, forces us to return to the very question with which we began our reasoning, namely: did living organisms come to land or actually create it as such? A.G. Ponomarenko (1993) believes that all the communities discussed above are, in fact, difficult to definitely call “terrestrial” or “communities of inland water bodies” (although at least the mats should have been in the water for a significant part of the time). He believes that “the existence of true continental bodies of water, both flowing and stagnant, seems very problematic until in the Devonian vascular vegetation somewhat reduced the rate of erosion and stabilized coastline"The main events had to take place in the already familiar flattened coastal amphibiotic landscapes without a stable coastline - “neither land, nor sea” (see Chapter 5).

A no less unusual (from the point of view of today) situation should have developed on the watersheds occupied by “primary deserts.” Nowadays, deserts exist in conditions of lack of moisture (when evaporation exceeds precipitation) - which prevents the development of vegetation. But in the absence of plants, the landscape paradoxically became more deserted (in appearance) the more precipitation fell: water actively eroded the mountain slopes, cutting deep canyons, when reaching the plain it gave rise to conglomerates, and further along the plain psephytes scattered across the surface spread, which called plain proluvium; Nowadays such deposits form only the alluvial fans of temporary watercourses.

This picture allows us to take a fresh look at one strange circumstance. Almost all known Silurian-Devonian terrestrial floras and faunas are found at various points on the ancient Continent of Red Sandstone, so named for its characteristic rocks - red flowers; all locations are associated with deposits considered deltaic. In other words, it turns out that this entire continent (uniting Europe and eastern North America) is, as it were, one continuous giant delta. A reasonable question: where were the corresponding rivers located - after all, there are simply no drainage areas for them on a continent of that size! It remains to be assumed that all these “deltaic” deposits, apparently, arose precisely as a result of erosion processes in the “wet deserts” described above.

So, life on land (which, however, is not yet completely dry) seems to have existed since time immemorial, and at the end of the Silurian, another group of plants simply appears - vascular plants (Tracheophyta)... However, in fact, the appearance of vascular plants is one of the key events in the history of the biosphere, because in its environment-forming role this group of living organisms has no equal, at least among eukaryotes. It was vascular vegetation that made, as we will see later, a decisive contribution to the formation of terrestrial landscapes of the modern appearance.

The generally accepted point of view is that some algae that lived near the shore first “stuck their heads into the air,” then populated the tidal zone, and then, gradually turning into higher plants, completely came out onto the shore. This was followed by their gradual conquest of the land. Most botanists consider one of the groups of green algae - Charophyta - to be the ancestors of higher plants; They now form continuous thickets on the bottom of continental water bodies - both fresh and salty, while in the sea (and even then only in desalinated bays) only a few species are found. Characeae have a differentiated thallus and complex reproductive organs; They are similar to higher plants by several unique anatomical and cytological features - symmetrical sperm, the presence of a phragmoplast (a structure involved in the construction of the cell wall during division) and the presence of the same set of photosynthetic pigments and reserve nutrients.

However, a serious - purely paleontological - objection was raised against this point of view. If the process of transformation of algae into higher plants really occurred in coastal waters (where conditions for entering the fossil record are most favorable), then why do we not see any of its intermediate stages? Moreover, the characeae themselves appeared in the Late Silurian - simultaneously with vascular plants, and the peculiarities of the biology of this group do not give grounds to assume a long period of “hidden existence” for it... Therefore, a paradoxical, at first glance, hypothesis appeared: why , in fact, the appearance of macroremains of higher plants at the end of the Silurian should be unambiguously interpreted as traces of their emergence onto land? Perhaps, quite the opposite - these are traces of the migration of higher plants into water? In any case, many paleobotanists (S.V. Meyen, G. Stebbins, G. Hill) actively supported the hypothesis about the origin of higher plants not from aquatic macrophytes (such as Characeae), but from terrestrial green algae. It was these terrestrial (and therefore having no real chance of being buried) “primary higher plants” that could belong to the mysterious spores with a three-rayed slit, which were very numerous in the Early Silurian and even in the Late Ordovician (starting from the Caradocian age).

However, it recently became clear that, apparently, supporters of both points of view are right - each in their own way. The fact is that some of the microscopic terrestrial green algae have the same complex of subtle cytological characters that charophytes and vascular algae (see above); these microalgae are now included in Charophyta. Thus, a completely logical and consistent picture emerges. Initially, there existed - on land - a group of green algae ("microscopic characeae"), from which two closely related groups emerged in the Silurian: the "true" characeae, which populated continental water bodies, and higher plants, which began to colonize the land, and only after some time (in full according to Meyen's scheme) appearing in coastal habitats.

From your botany course you should know that higher plants (Embryophyta) are divided into vascular plants (Tracheophyta) and bryophytes (Bryophyta) - mosses and liverworts. Many botanists (for example, J. Richardson, 1992) believe that it is liverworts (based on their modern life strategies) are the main contenders for the role of “land pioneers”: they now live on terrestrial algal films, in shallow ephemeral reservoirs, in the soil - together with blue-green algae. Interestingly, the nitrogen-fixing blue-green alga Nostoc is able to live inside the tissues of some liverworts and anthocerotes, providing its hosts with nitrogen; this was probably very important for the first inhabitants of primitive soils, where this element could not but be in severe deficiency. The above-mentioned spores from the Late Ordovician and Early Silurian deposits are most similar to the spores of liverworts (reliable macrofossils of these plants appear later, in the Early Devonian).

However, in any case, bryophytes (even if they really appeared in the Ordovician) hardly changed the appearance of continental landscapes. The first vascular plants - rhinophytes - appeared in the Late Silurian (Ludlovian Age); up to the Early Devonian (Zhedino Age), they were represented by extremely monotonous remains of the only genus Cooksonia, the simplest and most archaic of the vascular species. But in the deposits of the next century of the Devonian (Siegen) we already find a wide variety of rhyniophytes (Figure 30). Since that time, two evolutionary lines have separated among them. One of them will go from the genus Zosterophylum to the lycophytes (their number also includes tree-like lepidodendrons - one of the main coal-formers in the next, Carboniferous, period). The second line (the genus Psilophyton is usually placed at its base) leads to horsetails, ferns and seed plants - gymnosperms and angiosperms (Figure 30). Even the Devonian rhinophytes are still very primitive and, frankly speaking, it is unclear whether they can be called “higher plants” in the strict sense: they have a vascular bundle (though composed not of tracheids, but of special elongated cells with a peculiar relief of the walls), but lack stomata . This combination of characteristics should indicate that these plants have never encountered water deficiency (we can say that their entire surface is one large open stomata), and, most likely, were helophytes (that is, they grew “knee-deep in water ", like today's reeds).

The appearance of vascular plants with their rigid vertical axes caused a cascade of ecosystem innovations that changed the appearance of the entire biosphere:

1. Photosynthetic structures began to be located in three-dimensional space, and not on a plane (as was the case until now - during the period of dominance of algal crusts and lichens). This sharply increased the intensity of the formation of organic matter and, thereby, the total productivity of the biosphere.

2. The vertical arrangement of the trunks made the plants more resistant to being washed away by fine earth (compared, for example, to algal crusts). This reduced the irreversible loss of unoxidized carbon (in the form of organic matter) by the ecosystem - improving the carbon cycle.

3. Vertical trunks of terrestrial plants must be quite rigid (compared to aquatic macrophytes). To provide this rigidity, a new tissue arose - wood, which decomposes relatively slowly after the death of the plant. Thus, the carbon cycle of the ecosystem acquires an additional reserve depot and, accordingly, is stabilized.

4. The emergence of a permanent supply of difficult-to-decomposable organic matter (concentrated mainly in the soil) leads to a radical restructuring of food chains. Since that time, most of the matter and energy is circulated through detritus rather than through grazing chains (as was the case in aquatic ecosystems).

5. To decompose the difficult-to-digest substances that make up wood - cellulose and lignin - new types of destroyers of dead organic matter were required. Since that time, on land, the role of the main destructors has passed from bacteria to fungi.

6. To maintain the trunk in a vertical position (under the influence of gravity and winds), a developed root system: rhizoids - like algae and bryophytes - are no longer enough here. This led to a noticeable decrease in erosion and the appearance of fixed (rhizosphere) soils.

S.V. Meyen believes that the land should have been covered with vegetation by the end of the Devonian (Siegenian), since from the beginning of the next, Carboniferous, period, almost all types of sediments now deposited on the continents were formed on Earth. In pre-Sigen times, continental precipitation is practically absent - apparently due to its constant secondary erosion as a result of unregulated runoff. At the very beginning of the Carboniferous, coal accumulation began on the continents - and this indicates that powerful plant filters stood in the way of water flow. Without them, plant remains would continuously mix with sand and clay, so that the result would be clastic rocks enriched in plant remains - carbonaceous shales and carbonaceous sandstones, and not real coals.

So, a dense “brush” of helophytes that has arisen in coastal amphibiotic landscapes (one can call it “rhiniophyte reed”) begins to act as a filter regulating raincoat runoff: it intensively filters (and deposits) the debris carried from the land and thereby forms a stable coastline . Some analogue of this process can be the formation of “alligator ponds” by crocodiles: animals constantly deepen and expand the swamp reservoirs they inhabit, throwing soil onto the shore. As a result of their many years of “irrigation activities,” the swamp is transformed into a system of clean, deep ponds separated by wide forested “dams.” Thus, vascular vegetation in the Devonian divided the notorious amphibiotic landscapes into “real land” and “real freshwater bodies.” It would not be a mistake to say that it was vascular vegetation that became the true executor of the spell: “Let there be firmament!” - having separated this firmament from the abyss...

It is with the newly emerged freshwater bodies that the appearance in the Late Devonian (Famennian Age) of the first tetrapods (quadrupeds) - a group of vertebrates with two pairs of limbs - is associated; it combines amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds (simply put, tetrapods are all vertebrates, except fish and fish-like creatures). It is now generally accepted that tetrapods originate from lobe-finned fishes (Rhipidistia) (Figure 31); this relict group now has a single living representative, coelacanth. The once quite popular hypothesis of the origin of tetrapods from another relict group of fish - lungfish (Dipnoi), now has practically no supporters.

It should be noted that in previous years, the emergence of a key feature of tetrapods - two pairs of five-fingered limbs - was considered their unambiguous adaptation to a terrestrial (or at least amphibiotic) lifestyle. Nowadays, however, most researchers are inclined to believe that the “problem of the appearance of four-legged animals” and the “problem of their emergence onto land” are different things and not even related to each other by a direct causal relationship. The ancestors of tetrapods lived in shallow, often drying up, abundantly overgrown with vegetation reservoirs of variable configuration. Apparently, the limbs appeared in order to move along the bottom of reservoirs (this is especially important when the reservoir has become so shallow that your back begins to stick out) and push through dense thickets of helophytes; The limbs turned out to be especially useful for crawling on dry land to another neighboring one when the reservoir dried up.

The first, Devonian, tetrapods - primitive amphibians labyrinthodonts (the name comes from their teeth with labyrinth-like folds of enamel - a structure directly inherited from lobe-finned animals: see Figure 31), such as Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, are always found in burials together with fish, which, Apparently, they were eating. They were covered with scales like fish, had a caudal fin (similar to what we see in catfish or burbot), lateral line organs and - in some cases - developed gill apparatus; their limb is not yet five-fingered (the number of fingers reaches 8), and according to the type of articulation with the axial skeleton, it is typically swimming, and not supporting. All this leaves no doubt that these creatures were purely aquatic (Figure 32); if they appeared on land under certain “fire” circumstances (drying out of a reservoir), then they most certainly were not a component of terrestrial ecosystems. Only much later, in the Carboniferous period, small terrestrial amphibians appeared - anthracosaurs, which, apparently, fed on arthropods, but more on this later (see Chapter 10).

Particularly noteworthy is the fact that in the Devonian a number of unrelated parallel groups of stegocephalopod-like lobe-finned fishes appeared - both before and after the appearance of “true” tetrapods (labyrinthodonts). One of these groups were panderichthids - lobe-finned fish, lacking dorsal and anal fins, which is not the case in any other fish. In terms of the structure of the skull (no longer “fish”, but “crocodile”), the shoulder girdle, the histology of the teeth and the position of the choanae (internal nostrils), panderichthids are very similar to Ichthyostega, but acquired these characteristics clearly independently. Thus, we have before us a process that can be called parallel tetrapodization of lobe-fins (it was studied in detail by E.I. Vorobyova). As usual, the “order” for the creation of a four-legged vertebrate capable of living (or at least surviving) on ​​land was given by the biosphere not to one, but to several “design bureaus”; Ultimately, the group of lobe-finned fish that “created” the modern type of tetrapods known to us “won the competition.” However, along with “real” tetrapods, for a long time there existed a whole spectrum of ecologically similar semi-aquatic animals (such as panderichthids), combining the characteristics of fish and amphibians - so to speak, “waste products” of the process of tetrapodization of lobe-finned animals.

Notes

Scorpios form a specialized group of marine crustacean scorpions already familiar to us (from Chapter 7) - eurypterids, whose representatives moved from swimming to walking along the bottom and, having acquired small sizes, first mastered the sea littoral zone, and then the land.

With the discovery of Cambrian marine centipede-like arthropods, their existence on the Early Paleozoic land seems quite probable, although reliable finds of millipedes in continental sediments appear only in the Late Silurian.

It is possible that macroscopic plants already existed on land in the Vendian. At this time on thallum some algae ( Kanilovia) mysterious, complex microstructures appear in the form of a spiral chitinoid ribbon breaking in a zigzag manner. M. B. Burzin (1996) quite logically suggested that they serve to scatter spores, and such a mechanism is necessary only in the air.

Psephites are loose sediments of clastic material, coarser than “clay” (pelites) and “sand” (psammites).

None of the higher plants is capable of nitrogen fixation, i.e. to convert nitrogen from atmospheric gas N2 into an assimilable form (for example, NO3– ions). This is an additional argument in favor of the fact that by the time higher plants appeared on land, prokaryotic communities had long existed there, which enriched the soil with nitrogen in an accessible form.

A more common name is psilophytes– are not used now for nomenclatural reasons. In the literature of recent years you may come across another name - propteridophytes.

Representatives of almost all the main divisions of higher plants appeared, not only spore(lycophytes, pteridophytes, horsetails), but also gymnosperms ( ginkgo).

The truly romantic story of the discovery of this “living fossil”, described in the wonderful book by J. Smith “Old Quadruped,” is widely known. It should, however, be noted that the lifestyle of the coelacanth has nothing in common with that of the Devonian rhipidistia: it lives in the Indian Ocean at depths of several hundred meters.

Old name " stegocephalians”, which you can find in books, is not used now.

We don’t call an eel a “terrestrial creature,” which is capable of crawling at night through dewy grass from one body of water to another, covering a distance of several hundred meters!