Tulipa sp. - tulip flower (cultivar) in Ohio, USA. (9 May 2016)

Plants are multicellular, photosynthesizing eucaryotes. Most species occupy terrestrial environments, but they also occur in freshwater and saltwater aquatic environments. The oldest known land plants in the fossil record are Ordovician to Silurian. Land plant body fossils are known in Silurian sedimentary rocks - they are small and simple plants (e.g., Cooksonia). Fossil root traces in paleosol horizons are known in the Ordovician. During the Devonian, the first trees and forests appeared. Earth's initial forestation event occurred during the Middle to Late Paleozoic. Earth's continents have been partly to mostly covered with forests ever since the Late Devonian. Occasional mass extinction events temporarily removed much of Earth's plant ecosystems - this occurred at the Permian-Triassic boundary (251 million years ago) and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (65 million years ago).

The most conspicuous group of living plants is the angiosperms, the flowering plants. They first unambiguously appeared in the fossil record during the Cretaceous. They quickly dominated Earth's terrestrial ecosystems, and have dominated ever since. This domination was due to the evolutionary success of flowers, which are structures that greatly aid angiosperm reproduction.

Tulips are Old World flowering plants, but their colorful, attractive flowers have resulted in widespread cultivation by humans. Tulip flowers have only one color each. Bicolored tulips, such as the example seen above, were noticed and highly valued centuries ago in Europe, especially Holland (see: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania" rel="nofollow">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania</a> ). Such flowers are called "breaking tulips", with feathery or flame-like patterns. The coloration pattern of breaking tulips is a symptom of a plant disease caused by a species of Potyvirus called the tulip breaking virus. Modern tulip hybridization efforts have resulted in non-diseased tulips that mimic breaking tulips. The individual shown above is an example.

Classification: Plantae, Angiospermophyta, Liliales, Liliaceae

Locality: cultivar in Dover, Ohio, USA

More info. at: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip" rel="nofollow">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip</a> and