the lack of palaeontological evidence, as pointed out by Darwin himself. While it is easy to imagine natural selection producing the variation seen within genera and families, the transmutation between the higher categories was harder to imagine. The dramatic find of the London specimen of Archaeopteryx in 1861, only two years after the publication of Darwin's work, offered for the first time a link between the class of the highly derived birds, and that of the more basal reptiles. In a letter to Darwin, the palaeontologist Hugh Falconer wrote: Had the Solnhofen quarries been commissioned—by august command—to turn out a strange being à la Darwin—it could not have executed the behest more handsomely—than in the Archaeopteryx. Thus, transitional fossils like Archaeopteryx came to be seen as not only corroborating Darwin's theory, but as icons of evolution in their own right. For example, the Swedish encyclopedic dictionary Nordisk familjebok of 1904 showed an inaccurate Archaeopteryx reconstruction (see illustration) of the fossil, "ett af de betydelsefullaste paleontologiska fynd, som någonsin gjorts" ("one of the most significant paleontological discoveries ever made"). The rise of plants Transitional fossils are not only those of animals. With the increasing mapping of the divisions of plants at the beginning of the 20th century, the search began for the ancestor of the vascular plants. In 1917, Robert Kidston and William Henry Lang found the remains of an extremely primitive plant in the Rhynie chert in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and named it Rhynia. The Rhynia plant was small and stick-like, with simple dichotomously branching stems without leaves, each tipped by a sporangium. The simple form echoes that of the sporophyte of mosses, and it has been shown that Rhynia had an alternation of generations, with a corresponding gametophyte in the form of crowded tufts of diminutive stems only a few millimetres in height. Rhynia thus falls midway between mosses and early vascular plants like ferns and clubmosses. From a carpet of moss-like gametophytes, the larger Rhynia sporophytes grew much like simple clubmosses, spreading by means of horizontal growing stems growing rhizoids that anchored the plant to the substrate. The unusual mix of moss-like and vascular traits and the extreme structural simplicity of the plant had huge implications for botanical understanding. Missing links The idea of all living things being linked through some sort of transmutation process predates Darwin's theory of evolution. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck envisioned that life was generated constantly in