in plants, how does a Redwood, one of the tallest trees in the world, move water from the soil to the needles on its tallest branches over 300 ft in the air? (That’s over 30 stories high!) Or how does a carrot transport the sugars made in its green, leafy tops below the surface of the soil to grow a sweet, orange taproot? Well, certain types of plants (vascular plants) have a system for transporting water, minerals, and nutrients (food!) throughout their bodies; it’s called the vascular system. Think of it as the plant’s plumbing, which is made up of cells that are stacked on top of one another to form long tubes from the tip of the root to the top of the plant. To learn more about it, let’s study the stem.
Certain fossils, called index fossils, help geologists match rock layers. To be useful as an index fossil, a fossil must be widely distributed and represent a type of organism that existed for a brief time period.
