Land Plants Came First

 One of the paradoxes from nature and scripture had been that Genesis describes land plants coming before the seas were full of living creatures. The fossil record had indicated the reverse- that the seas were full of living things prior to plants making their way to land. 

Two studies now indicate this may have been an instance of science needing more time to catch up to scripture. This study from Nature, "The late-Pre-Cambrian Greening of the Earth" claims evidence of terrestrial photosynthesis as early as 850 million years ago. Long before even the Edicaran fauna. That study inferred the existence of these first land plants based on change in the carbon cycle, but this study may have found tiny fossils (1 millimeter or less) of them. 

That leaves only the question of why plants took so much longer to unfold into their current diversity than did ocean animals. My book on early Genesis already addressed that issue, but I am not sure talking about it in isolation would make as much sense as it would from seeing the larger case about the nature of creation being laid out and how it would be just what should be expected given a close reading of the text. The best I can do is say that it has to do with the fact that God commands the land itself to bring forth the plants and the land does so without any further help from Him, but when He commands the seas to bring forth He also participates in the process. 

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Strother, Paul K.; Battison, Leila; Brasier, Martin D.; Wellman, Charles H. (2011). "Earth's earliest non-marine eukaryotes". Nature. 473

Knauth, L. Paul; Kennedy, Martin J. (2009). "The late Precambrian greening of the Earth". Nature. 460