by Elio — "The fos­sil record of life's ear­li­est steps onto land is pro­foundly in­com­plete." So starts a pa­per by Cam­bridge University's Mar­tin Smith that helps shed light on this mo­men­tous hap­pen­ing. The climb ashore took place about 500 mil­lion years ago, give or take (no one seems to be quite sure of the date). These suc­cess­ful ad­ven­tur­ers were plants, but still far from the highly-evolved plants...