At 17:00 Beijing Time on May 30th, 2025, Nature Plants published online in article format the latest findings by Associate Professor LIU Lijing from the Department of Geology of Northwest University and her team—“Ordovician Marine Charophyceae and Insights into Land Plant Derivations” This announces the discovery of the earliest known fossil evidence of Charophyta on Earth in China’s Tarim and Ordos Basins. This research pushes back the geological record of Charophyta fossils from the Late Silurian to the Late Ordovician, advancing their origin time by approximately 28 million years. It provides crucial fossil evidence supporting the inference that land plants originated from Charophyta during the Ordovician period.
This discovery reveals for the first time that key morphological innovations in the evolutionary transition from Charophyta to land plants (such as multicellular branching and oogamous reproduction) had already appeared before the early Katian Age of the Late Ordovician. This finding holds significant scientific value for substantiating the hypothesis of the Ordovician origin of land plants from Charophyta.
LIU Lijing is the first author of the paper, with NWU being the first completion and corresponding institution. The Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the University of Tennessee, USA, are co-corresponding institutions. This research marks the first major achievement in the field of Ordovician algae and plant origins by the Early Life and Environment Innovation Research Team at NWU, led by Academician SHU Degan, Professor at the Department of Geology of NWU. This follows the team’s series of high-level research accomplishments in the origin and evolution of animal phyla during the Cambrian period.
