Tag: botany

The cryptogams are flowerless (non-flowering) and seedless, spore-bearing plants. Phanerogams are flower bearing, seed producing tracheophytes. Bryophytes and pteridophytes come under cryptogams. 

Lycopodium is a genus of clubmosses which is also known as ground pines or creeping cedar. They are flowerless, vascular, terrestrial or epiphytic plants, with widely branched, erect, prostrate or creeping stems, with small, simple, needle-like or scale-like leaves that cover the stem and branches thickly. Their leaves contain a single, unbranched vascular strand and are microphylls by definition. The kidney-shaped or reniform spore-cases (sporangia) contain spores of one kind only (isosporous, homosporous) and are borne on the upper surface of the leaf blade of specialized leaves (sporophylls) arranged in a cone-like strobilus at the end of upright stems. The club-shaped appearance of these fertile stems gives the clubmosses their common name.

Vascular cryptogams are plants that possess vascular tissues but do not produce seeds, which defines the Pteridophytes. Equisetum is a well-known genus of Pteridophytes.

Equisetum is commonly referred to as the horse-tail plant due to the appearance of its jointed, ribbed stems.

Pteridophytes are vascular plants and have leaves (known as fronds), roots and sometimes true stems, and tree ferns have full trunks. For example, ferns, horsetails and clubmosses. Fronds in the largest species of ferns can reach some six meters in length. Many ferns from tropical rain forests are epiphytes, which means they only grow on other plant species. Their water comes from the damp air or from rainfall running down branches and tree trunks. There are also some purely aquatic ferns such as water fern or water velvet (Salvinia molesta) and mosquito ferns (Azolla species). Thallophytes and bryophytes are not differentiated into roots, stems and leaves. Hydrophytes are differentiated into roots, stems and leaves and bear flowers and seeds. 

The correct answer is 'Pteropsida'

Stele can be defined as the central core of the stem and root of a vascular plant, consisting of the vascular tissue (xylem and phloem) and associated supporting tissue. 

Sporocarp is a reproductive structure of some aquatic ferns like Marsilea. Sporocarps are functionally and developmentally modified leafwhich bears several sori. Each sori consists of sporangia of two types -mega sporangia producing simple large female megaspore and microsporangia producing many small male microspore.

A fern is a member of a group of approximately 12,000 species of vascular plants which reproduce via spores and have neither seeds nor flowers. They differ from mosses by being vascular (i.e., having water-conducting vessels). They have stems and leaves, like other vascular plants. Most ferns have fiddleheads that expand into fronds, which are each delicately divided. Leptosporangiate ferns (sometimes called as true ferns) are by far the largest group, but ferns as defined here (ferns sensu lato) include horsetails, whisk ferns, marattioid ferns, and ophioglossoid ferns. This group may be referred to as monilophytes. The term pteridophyte traditionally refers to ferns plus a few other seedless vascular plants.

The mature male gametophyte of Selaginella consists of 13 cells: 1 prothallial cell and 12 cells forming the antheridium (4 jacket cells, 4 primary androgonial cells, and 4 androcytes).