fern

A vascular plant that reproduces by spores rather than seeds — one of the oldest plant lineages on earth, predating flowering plants by over 200 million years. Ferns dominated the Carboniferous forests whose compressed remains became coal. They persist in every moist, shaded habitat on the planet, from tropical rainforest floors to temperate ravines to the crevices of stone walls. The unfurling of a fern frond — the fiddlehead — is one of the most beautiful and mathematically precise movements in the plant world.