bio

Sporopollenin

The extraordinarily inert polymer coat around plant spores and pollen grains. It is chemically stubborn enough to resist drying, oxidation and ultraviolet light in life — and then to survive in rock for hundreds of millions of years after the body that made it has gone. That is why spores and pollen are the most abundant plant fossils, and why mid-Ordovician spores from roughly 475 million years ago are the first direct evidence of plants on land.