and Interesting Plant Facts
The earliest flower is a flower that scientists think is 120 million years
old. It was identified in the year 1989 by Dr. Leo Hickey and Dr. David
Taylor of Yale University, from a fossil discovered near Melbourne,
Australia. The fossil of the flower was discovered in Victoria, Australia.
The angiosperm resembles the modern black pepper plant. It has 2
leaves and one flower, and is known as the Koonwarra
plant.
A
Venus Fly Trap is a plant with a trap which
snaps closed to catch an
insect. This insect is its food. It can stay closed after catching the
insect
for a period of twenty or thirty days in some cases. When the fly trap
is
about to reopen, it can take a while to become fully open. It can close
rapidly if an insect goes in it when reopening.
Imagine
seeing large glaciers move across the land, watching Indians
battle, seeing the Pilgrims arrive, watching the Revolutionary War, the
Civil War, and hippies all in onelifetime? Well you could. That is, if
you were a bristle cone pine. They can live
to be 4,600 years old! (Let
me tell you, that's quite a few more years than your math teacher!)
Ah,
now let's settle back, close our eyes and picture this.
You're taking a leisurely stroll deep in the woods. You see a gigantic
shape looming in the distance. You slowly push the leaves aside to
reveal a HUGE flower.
If this ever happened, you'd have been lucky enough to see the titan
arum. It is a monster. If it was part human, you would NOT want
to
mess with it! It's actually taller than Shaq and Michael Jordan! It is
NINE feet tall, and THREE feet across! WOW!
This
fact is unbelievable! Imagine a water lily that can grow up to be 6
feet across!!! The Amazon water lily has a
lip around the leaf that is 6
inches high. The underside of this magnificent plant is a rich purple.
The
decending roots of a strangler fig encircles
the trunk of its host. The
fig kills the host tree and the dead tree rots away. All that's left is
the fig
roots shaped in a circle.
