# Did Plants Grow Slowly In The Dinosaur Days? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 22, 2012, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652 "2012-02-22T19:15:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2012, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/1 "2012-02-22T19:15:27Z")
I have a cycad plant-it is an ancient species, that was around in the time of the dinosaurs. It is a fascinating plant-I have had it for 4 years now (its a hardy variety)-I keep it indoors during winter. In four years, it has grown about an inch. Were ancient plants like these very slow growing? Or is this trait exclusive to the cycads? ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2012, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/2 "2012-02-22T19:42:10Z")
I once saw a crocodile yawn, so I’m pretty sure that all dinosaurs that ever lived slept all day long. ---
**Author:** ![Ellen\_Cherry](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellen_cherry/32/3600_2.png) [@Ellen\_Cherry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ellen_Cherry)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2012, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/3 "2012-02-22T19:49:45Z")
Moving thread from Cafe Society to General Questions, where hopefully it will take root. ---
**Author:** ![bup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6bbea6/32.png) [@bup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bup)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2012, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/4 "2012-02-22T20:08:44Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > I once saw a crocodile yawn, so I’m pretty sure that all dinosaurs that ever lived slept all day long. Crocodiles aren’t dinosaurs. Fossilized trees from the Mesozoic era have rings comparable to today’s trees. Assuming that rings then corresponded to ‘growth’ and ‘steady state’ periods, that means they grew at about the same rate as trees today. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2012, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/5 "2012-02-22T20:32:54Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > I have a cycad plant-it is an ancient species, that was around in the time of the dinosaurs. No, it isn’t. It is a modern species that is descended from species that were around at the time of the dinosaurs, just like grass and gum trees and three toed sloths and every other species on the planet. > [@](#): > > Were ancient plants like these very slow growing? Your plant is not an ancient species. There is no reason to believe it is any more ancient than your lawn grass. Speaking of actual ancient species, some of them would have been slow growing, just as your modern species is. That is a successful niche today and it would have been 1000 million years ago too. The vast majority of species were fast growing, just as they are today. > [@](#): > > Or is this trait exclusive to the cycads? Many species of plants are slow growing. ---
**Author:** ![heathen\_earthling](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/13edae/32.png) [@heathen\_earthling](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/heathen_earthling)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2012, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/6 "2012-02-22T20:40:48Z")
I don’t know about species, but some extant plant genera do date back to the Mesozoic. ---
**Author:** ![purplehorseshoe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/purplehorseshoe/32/2996_2.png) [@purplehorseshoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/purplehorseshoe)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2012, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/7 "2012-02-22T22:16:22Z")
Ginkgos - the only [surviving member](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginkgo)of their genus - have [been around](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_fossil)a pretty [long time](http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/seedplants/ginkgoales/ginkgofr.html), for example. ---
**Author:** ![Alka\_Seltzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c89c15/32.png) [@Alka\_Seltzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alka_Seltzer)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2012, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/8 "2012-02-22T22:34:55Z")
I doubt there is a definitive answer, some plants grow slowly and others quickly. Climatic conditions might have had an impact on average growth rates and the total amount of biomass the planet could support. ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2012, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/9 "2012-02-22T22:40:48Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Speaking of actual ancient species, some of them would have been slow growing, just as your modern species is. That is a successful niche today and it would have been 1000 million years ago too. The vast majority of species were fast growing, just as they are today. \ Can you please provide a cite showing that plants like this grew 1000 million years ago? Why on earth would you believe that plants like that existed at that time? \ ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2012, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/10 "2012-02-23T03:44:17Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > No, it isn’t. > > It is a modern species that is descended from species that were around at the time of the dinosaurs, just like grass and gum trees and three toed sloths and every other species on the planet. > > Your plant is not an ancient species. There is no reason to believe it is any more ancient than your lawn grass. Well, your point – it’s a modern species, albeit from an ancient lineage – is well taken. The odds, however, are in the cycad’s favor, since its lineage was around 150 million years before grass evolved, and cycads are AFAIK not noted for rapid evolution; if anything they’re very conservative. > [@](#): > > That is a successful niche today and it would have been 1000 million years ago too. The first land plants appear to be bryophytes from the Silurian’ vascuiar plants began in the earliest Devonian, just over 400 MYA. > [@](#): > > The vast majority of species were fast growing, just as they are today. > > Many species of plants are slow growing. True but with an important catch. Paleozoic land floras were dominated by ferns, horsetails, and club mosses and their close relatives. They looked very much like trees as depicted by an imaginative 5-year-old. After the post-Permian catastrophe, a Mesozoic fauna came in dominated by gymnosperms – conifers, ginkgoes, cycads, and several extinct groups. Ferns continued to be common. With our big-animal-centric viewpoint, we tend to see the next transition as the K-T impact/traps event (65 MYA) that put paid to the (non-avian) dinosaurs and most of what used to be tagged ‘reptiles’, along with most cephalopods and a host of other creatures. But nearly as important is the transition from Lower to Upper Cretaceous at 100 MYA. The Upper Cretaceous differed from the preceding epoch in three major ways: (1) almost all the dinosaurs we think of as typical Cretaceous dinosaurs – Tyrannosaurus, ankylosaurs, Triceratops, the duckbills, the ornithomimids, the dromaeosaurs, arose during it; (2) therian mammals – marsupials and placentals – arose and radiated during it, replacing all the Mesozoic mammals but the multituberculates and presumably the monotremes; and (3) angiosperms, flowering plants, a minor constituent of the Lower Cretaceous flora, became dominant over most niches, pressing conifers into a big-tree role and ferns into a forest-understory role and effectively suplanting everything else. This set the stage for the modern flora, although it didn’t develop until the evolution of grasses in the mid-Tertiary. Although ferns and primitive vascular plants are capable of rapid growth, they had constraints on what niches they could fill (e.g., nothing arid). Gymnosperms characeristically are slower of growth – though there are of course numeous fast-growing ones as well. Angiosperms could regenerate after being grazed faster than gymnosperms and could outcompete ferns for most niches. A typical Southeast scene in the Upper Cretaceous would seem very familiar – piney woods with a few magnolias here and there, apparent squirrels scampering on the tree branches and opossums browsing the mast below for prey. Until a dinosaur passed through. ---
**Author:** ![Darwins\_Finch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darwins_finch/32/20304_2.png) [@Darwins\_Finch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darwins_Finch)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2012, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/11 "2012-02-23T05:24:27Z")
> [@Polycarp](#): > > But nearly as important is the transition from Lower to Upper Cretaceous at 100 MYA. The Upper Cretaceous differed from the preceding epoch in three major ways: (1) almost all the dinosaurs we think of as typical Cretaceous dinosaurs – Tyrannosaurus, ankylosaurs, Triceratops, the duckbills, the ornithomimids, the dromaeosaurs, arose during it Eh? Ankylosaurs arose during the early Jurassic, ornithomimids during the late Jurassic, and dromaeosaurs in the mid-Jurassic. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2012, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/12 "2012-02-23T05:25:56Z")
> [@Polycarp](#): > > Well, your point – it’s a modern species, albeit from an ancient lineage – is well taken. The odds, however, are in the cycad’s favor, since its lineage was around 150 million years before grass evolved, and cycads are AFAIK not noted for rapid evolution; if anything they’re very conservative. The grass’s lineage has been around for exactly the same period of time. All life has a common ancestor. Any organism alive today has a lineage exactly as long as all others. There’s nothing about being a cycad that precludes and organism from speciation. > [@](#): > > The first land plants appear to be bryophytes from the Silurian’ vascuiar plants began in the earliest Devonian, just over 400 MYA. That should, or course, have been 100 million years ago. > [@](#): > > Although ferns and primitive vascular plants are capable of rapid growth, they had constraints on what niches they could fill (e.g., nothing arid). Ferns continue to to thrive in arid environments even today. Ferns aren’t as \*competitive \*as vascular plants in an arid environment because of their mode of reproduction. But that isn’t to say that they aren’t just as \*productive \*in that environment. They have largely been displaced by flowering plants in all environments, but that is not the same as saying that they can’t thrive in those environments. > [@](#): > > Gymnosperms characeristically are slower of growth – though there are of course numeous fast-growing ones as well. Once again, this may just be a result of selective pressure from angiosperms. Gymnosperms have largely been relegated to marginal environments of low fertility and aridity, to which they are better pre-adapted than angiosperms. Of course the survivors are largely going to be slower goring than the average angiosperm, because slow growth is favoured in environments of low fertility and aridity. That doesn’t allow us to conclude that angiosperms that lived in productive regions exhibited similarly slow growth. If you did a comparison of angiosperms from environments of low fertility and aridity and angiosperms from more productive environments, you would likewise find slower average growth rates. But that’s a characteristic of the environment, not the clade. > [@](#): > > Angiosperms could regenerate after being grazed faster than gymnosperms.. While this was accepted wisdom for many decades, there is precious little evidence to support it, and it is being rethought by palaeoecologists. We know, for example, that even the sub-polar regions of the Cretaceous supported more animal biomass than many equatorial regions today. That strongly suggests that the vegetation then could recover \*faster \*than modern vegetation. Angiosperms have numerous advantages over gymnosperms, but most of that advantage seems to be reproductive. They can produce small seeds and they can disperse genetic material rapidly and thus achieve great genetic diversity and win the arms race against animals. Angiosperms appear to have been able to adopt a strategy of relying on chemical warfare. The diversity of toxins and unpalatable inclusions in angiosperms is much, much greater than in gymnosperms. When you compare chemical defences within clades, the difference is even more striking. A single genus of gymnosperms will include species that produce glycosides and cyanogenics and oxalates and a dozen other distinct chemical defences. In the gymnosperms the toxins will be amazingly conservative across entire families. What that means is that the angiosperms have diversified to avoid predation. Any specie of animal has to become a specialist in eating just one species to have any hope of keeping pace in the arms race, and very rapidly it loses the ability to eat many other plants. In contrast, the chemical defences of gymnosperms are so conservative that if an animal can eat one member of a family, it can almost certainly eat them all. In the face of predation, gymnosperms only really have two options: recover fast or engage sclerophylly. Recovering fast is, of course, extremely wasteful of resources. Any gymnosperm that has to regrow 10% of its biomass every week isn’t never going to compete against a suite of angiosperm species that, on average, only need to replace 1%. Sclerophylly doesn’t work well in productive environments because it precludes responding to the environment itself. Tissue can only be produced once every few years, so as conditions change, you’re stuck with a one-size-fits-none body form. So in productive environments gymnosperms just couldn’t compete. But sclerophylly is a great tactic for unproductive environments. It’s harder for animals to evolve a defence against leaves that are simply indigestible and spiky, and in those environments nutrients are too scarce to be able to grow new tissues in response to environmental fluctuations. One-size-fits-all is enforced on all plants. So in those environments the gymnosperms have managed to compete well precisely because they are slow growing. The upshot being that most gymnosperms that have managed to compete with angiosperms are slow growing. But that doesn’t mean that all gymnosperms have always been slow growing. It just means that only the slow growing forms are competitive. In contrast angiosperms in productive environments actually get eaten less than gymnosperms, which is why they outcompete them.It’s not that they recover any faster, it’s that they avoid needing to recover. ---
**Author:** ![Cheshire\_Human](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Cheshire\_Human](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheshire_Human)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2012, 6:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/13 "2012-02-23T06:40:49Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > … That is a successful niche today and it would have been 1000 million years ago too… Considering the competition in the Pre-Cambrian, just about any land plant, no matter how slow growing, would have been successful. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![heathen\_earthling](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/13edae/32.png) [@heathen\_earthling](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/heathen_earthling)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2012, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/14 "2012-02-23T06:58:39Z")
> [@Polycarp](#): > > (2) therian mammals – marsupials and placentals – arose and radiated during it, replacing all the Mesozoic mammals but the multituberculates and presumably the monotremes; It doesn’t answer the question about plants, but you may be interested to learn that a [Jurassic therian mammal](http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-discovery-million-year-old-fossil-milestone-early.html) was published last year. ---
**Author:** ![bup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6bbea6/32.png) [@bup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bup)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2012, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/15 "2012-02-23T15:17:00Z")
> [@heathen\_earthling](#): > > It doesn’t answer the question about plants, but you may be interested to learn that a [Jurassic therian mammal](http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-discovery-million-year-old-fossil-milestone-early.html) was published last year. That’s impressive. How old is the little fella? ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2012, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/16 "2012-02-24T00:14:22Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > No, it isn’t. > > It is a modern species that is descended from species that were around at the time of the dinosaurs, just like grass and gum trees and three toed sloths and every other species on the planet. Actually, that’s not true at all. There are plenty of ancient species out there that are the exact same as they were millions (or in a few cases, hundreds of millions) of years ago. Take the Horseshoe Crab for example. Or the crocodiles. Or any of the other “living fossils” that haven’t changed since their fossil ancestors left records. [Link to living fossils](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_fossil) ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2012, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/17 "2012-02-24T00:33:47Z")
> [@bump](#): > > Actually, that’s not true at all. There are plenty of ancient species out there that are the exact same as they were millions (or in a few cases, hundreds of millions) of years ago. > > Take the Horseshoe Crab for example. Or the crocodiles. Or any of the other “living fossils” that haven’t changed since their fossil ancestors left records. > > [Link to living fossils](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_fossil) Oh God. We’ve debunked this nonsense at least 4 times in the last 3 months. And it keeps coming back. The least you could have done is read your own link, which states outright that what you just posted is utterly incorrect. Since you didn’t bother to do so, it seems that this is willful ignorance, and I honestly don’t have the energy required to keep fighting willful ignorance on this topic. So all I will just say is that everything you just posted is complete nonsense. ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2012, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/18 "2012-02-24T01:04:52Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Oh God. > > We’ve debunked this nonsense at least 4 times in the last 3 months. And it keeps coming back. > > The least you could have done is read your own link, which states outright that what you just posted is utterly incorrect. Since you didn’t bother to do so, it seems that this is willful ignorance, and I honestly don’t have the energy required to keep fighting willful ignorance on this topic. > > So all I will just say is that everything you just posted is complete nonsense. While the term “exact” in the other post is probably the wrong choice, this quote about the coelacanth seems to imply the post was substantially accurate if the term “exact” were replaced with “substantially the same”: “The coelacanth is thought to have evolved into roughly its current form approximately 400 million years ago.[4]” ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2012, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/19 "2012-02-24T01:10:44Z")
It keeps fighting back. ---
**Author:** ![Darwins\_Finch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darwins_finch/32/20304_2.png) [@Darwins\_Finch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darwins_Finch)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2012, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652/20 "2012-02-24T01:30:52Z")
> [@RaftPeople](#): > > While the term “exact” in the other post is probably the wrong choice, this quote about the coelacanth seems to imply the post was substantially accurate if the term “exact” were replaced with “substantially the same”: > > “The coelacanth is thought to have evolved into roughly its current form approximately 400 million years ago.[4]” Note that there are several families, genera & species of [coelacanth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth#Taxonomy). The extant genus, _Latimeria_, is only the most recent genus. It remains very similar to earlier forms, but the fossil versions are classified as different genera/families because there are differences between them and the modern genus (or, more correctly, _Latimeria_ was erected as a separate genus because the extant forms exhibited differences from the fossil forms). The overall form of coelacanths as a group has remained conservative over hundreds of millions years, but that is not the same as saying that one species has persisted, unchanged, for that whole time. _Latimeria_ itself has no fossil record to speak of, so we don’t know exactly how old it is as a genus. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-plants-grow-slowly-in-the-dinosaur-days/613652.md?page=2)