A primitive or ancestral type of seed or spore, especially in botanical contexts referring to early-evolved seed structures.
From Greek archi- (primitive, first) + sperma (seed). The term appears in 19th-century botanical literature to describe seed types thought to be ancestral to modern seeds.
Plants didn't always have seeds—archisperm refers to the most primitive seed types, and botanists used it to trace how plants evolved from spore-makers to seed-makers, basically the plant kingdom's 'great leap forward.'
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