One of the things I love to do is to see who visits our little blog, which apparently has pretty good search engine rankings on obscure terms. One person landed on our blog today by searching for “prehistoric land plant craft”. Satori Smiles ranks second. We’ve never done a prehistoric land plant craft! Yet… How did Google know that we were planning on making such a craft this week? I do not know, but it is tres cool. ;)

Cooksonia

Cooksonia

The Cooksonia is the best known prehistoric plants that first inhabited land, living more than 400 million years ago. Only a few centimeters tall, the Cooksonia had no leaves, flowers or even roots. Just a simple stalk, that branched dichotomously a few times. It’s branches ended in a rounded thingie (sporangia) that gave off its spores. It’s simplicity compelled me to design a simple craft out of it. And it only took two minutes!

Cooksonia – Prehistoric Land Plant Craft

Prehistoric Plant craft

You’ll need:

  • Green chenille stems (now don’t try to get fancy and used shaped pipe cleaner stems, these plants had no leaves!)
  • Orange or Yellow pom-poms
  • Glue
  • Scissors
  • “Vase” (we made one out of a toilet paper roll)

No sooner had I set these items on the table, when Satori independently made her very own Cooksonia plant! I suppose it isn’t too hard, but I was impressed that my 4 year old knew what I was up to when I said we were going to make a Cooksonia plant! We had seen a few photos of this plant. To make yours, simply glue the puffs (your sporangia) to the end of the stem. If you can, try to branch dichotomously, two branches sprouting off at the same point.

Cooksonia craft

Cooksonia craft

Here’s our first Cooksonia, you can still see the white glue.

Cooksonia - first land plant

Cooksonia - first land plant

I think we’ve covered early plant life pretty well, last week we walked in our forest and saw examples of the first plants – mosses, lichens, ferns, and horsetails.

More about Cooksonia

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