Prehistoric plants exhibition in the Netherlands

This video from the USA says about itself:

Permian Plant Fossils

27 September 2011

Travel back in time 280 million years ago, with Dr. Bill DiMichele Curator of Fossil Plants for the Smithsonian, and explore what the environment was like on the Permian seacoast. Find out how the plants left their mark in the mud to be preserved for hundreds of millions of years.

This year, from 25 April till 1 October, there is an exhibition about prehistoric plants in the botanical garden in Leiden in the Netherlands.

As we arrived at the garden on 25 April, a coot and two red-eared slider turtles on the bar in the canal. The coot, after cleaning its feathers, soon swam away. Under the next bridge, there was a coot nest.

There were many plant fossils, from the Netherlands and abroad, at the exhibition. They included finds of the Bennettitales order. They lived mainly at the same time as dinosaurs, and became extinct at roughly the same time. Probably their closest relatives, cycads, still survive. The exhibition consists not only of fossils; but also of living plants like cycads, ferns, and others with hundreds of millions of years of history before flowering plants became the main flora group.

Seed ferns look superficially like ferns. But, contrary to real ferns, they have seeds. Today, they are around only as fossils, like at the Leiden exhibition.

At the exhibition, there are plants from when land plant life began; during the Silurian age, and arguably even earlier.

Among the exhibits: Rhacophyton condrusorum, from the Devonian in Belgium. Maybe, an ancestor of ferns.

Also, Calamites cisti. A relative of modern horsetails. But, unlike them, a tree. About 300 million years old, from the late Carboniferous. Many of the exhibits are from that time. In coal mines in the Netherlands, and Belgium and Germany not far away, miners found quite some specimens.