These passages review The Urantia Book’s account of plant evolution and mutations. There is research that supports this, but the scientific dates do not correlate this far back in time. Take into consideration Chris Halvorson’s treatise—History of Life—on the disconnect between Urantia Book dates and scientific dates.
From The Urantia Book:
(59:4.0) Paper 59: The Marine-Life Era On Urantia. Section 4: The Great Land-Emergence Stage. The Vegetative Land-Life Period. The Age of Fishes
(59:4.2) As the land emerges from the last Silurian inundation, an important period in world development and life evolution comes to an end. It is the dawn of a new age on earth. The naked and unattractive landscape of former times is becoming clothed with luxuriant verdure, and the first magnificent forests will soon appear.
(59:4.4) 270,000,000 years ago the continents were all above water. In millions upon millions of years not so much land had been above water at one time; it was one of the greatest land-emergence epochs in all world history.
(59:4.16) 230,000,000 years ago the seas were continuing their retreat. …
(59:4.17) The elevation of the continents proceeded, and the atmosphere was becoming enriched with oxygen. The earth was overspread by vast forests of ferns one hundred feet high and by the peculiar trees of those days, silent forests; not a sound was heard, not even the rustle of a leaf, for such trees had no leaves.
(59:5.20) 180,000,000 years ago brought the close of the Carboniferous period, …
(59:5.22) The plants of these times were spore bearing, and the wind was able to spread them far and wide. The trunks of the Carboniferous trees were commonly seven feet in diameter and often one hundred and twenty-five feet high. The modern ferns are truly relics of these bygone ages.
(59:6.10) 160,000,000 years ago the land was largely covered with vegetation adapted to support land-animal life, and the atmosphere had become ideal for animal respiration. Thus ends the period of marine-life curtailment and those testing times of biologic adversity which eliminated all forms of life except such as had survival value, and which were therefore entitled to function as the ancestors of the more rapidly developing and highly differentiated life of the ensuing ages of planetary evolution.
(59:6.11) The ending of this period of biologic tribulation, known to your students as the Permian, also marks the end of the long Paleozoic era, which covers one quarter of the planetary history, two hundred and fifty million years.
(60:0.2) The closing epochs of the preceding era were indeed the age of frogs, but these ancestors of the land vertebrates were no longer dominant, having survived in greatly reduced numbers. Very few types outlived the rigorous trials of the preceding period of biologic tribulation. Even the spore-bearing plants were nearly extinct.
(60:2.1) 120,000,000 years ago a new phase of the reptilian age began. …
(60:2.7) The flora of this age was much like that of the preceding. Ferns persisted, while conifers and pines became more and more like the present-day varieties. …
(60:3.0) Paper 60. Urantia During the Early Land-Life Era
(60:3.1) The great Cretaceous period derives its name from the predominance of the prolific chalk-making foraminifers in the seas. This period brings Urantia to near the end of the long reptilian dominance and witnesses the appearance of flowering plants and bird life on land. …
(60:3.7) 90,000,000 years ago the angiosperms emerged from these early Cretaceous seas and soon overran the continents. These land plants suddenly appeared along with fig trees, magnolias, and tulip trees. Soon after this time fig trees, breadfruit trees, and palms overspread Europe and the western plains of North America. No new land animals appeared.
(60:3.16) 65,000,000 years ago …
(60:3.19.Great plant-life evolution was taking place. Among the land plants the angiosperms predominated, and many present-day trees first appeared, including beech, birch, oak, walnut, sycamore, maple, and modern palms. Fruits, grasses, and cereals were abundant, and these seed-bearing grasses and trees were to the plant world what the ancestors of man were to the animal world—they were second in evolutionary importance only to the appearance of man himself. Suddenly and without previous gradation, the great family of flowering plants mutated. And this new flora soon overspread the entire world.
(60:3.20) 60,000,000 years ago, though the land reptiles were on the decline, the dinosaurs continued as monarchs of the land, the lead now being taken by the more agile and active types of the smaller leaping kangaroo varieties of the carnivorous dinosaurs. But sometime previously there had appeared new types of the herbivorous dinosaurs, whose rapid increase was due to the appearance of the grass family of land plants. One of these new grass-eating dinosaurs was a true quadruped having two horns and a capelike shoulder flange. …
(60:4.5) Biologically as well as geologically this was an eventful and active age on land and under water. … On land the fern forests were largely replaced by pine and other modern trees, including the gigantic redwoods. …
(65:6.3) The most important step in plant evolution was the development of chlorophyll-making ability, and the second greatest advance was the evolution of the spore into the complex seed. The spore is most efficient as a reproductive agent, but it lacks the potentials of variety and versatility inherent in the seed.
Related Research:
From the summary of a 2021 study published by ScienceDaily:
“A new method for quantifying plant evolution reveals that after the onset of early seed plants, comsplexity halted for 250 million years until the diversification of flowering plants about 100 million years ago.”
It goes on to say:
“An unusual comparison
“Flowers are more diverse than every other group of plants, producing colors, smells and shapes that nourish animals and delight the senses. They are also intricate: petals, anthers and pistils interweave in precise arrangements to lure pollinators and trick them into spreading pollen from one flower to another.
“This complexity makes it difficult for scientists to compare flowering plants to plants with simpler reproductivesystems, such as ferns or some conifers. As a result, botanists have long focused on characteristics within family groups and typically study evolution in non-flowering plants separately from their more intricate flowering relatives.”