How to Grow a Planet

A fascinating story about the development of life in the prehistoric era. Gorgeous shots of nature, good visualization of prehistoric events.

It's funny, the film was released only 14 years ago, but modern science already refutes that plants were the first to inhabit the earth. ☘️

If we rely on the most recent paleontological finds, then fungi were the first to come to land. They outstripped plants in this race by hundreds of millions of years.

The oldest fossilized remains of fungi found in China are about 635 million years old. The first terrestrial plants known from microscopic spores appeared much later— about 470-480 million years ago.

Well, if you really dig into ancient times, then the pioneers are bacteria and archaea (more than 1 billion years ago): They were indeed the first to explore wet land areas, creating thin biofilms. The second wave was fungi and lichens, which destroyed rocks and created primary soil for thousands of years, and the third wave brought real plants, the ancestors of modern mosses, onto the scene.

The truth is somewhere nearby, and it's interesting how hypotheses and ideas about ancient life will change in another ten years. But the series tells interesting facts about plants with a pleasant visual.