Thallophyte

The thallophytes are multicellular organisms that do not have tissues or the set of organs characteristic of vascular plants, that is, they do not have stems, roots and leaves; The undifferentiated body of these organisms is called talus. They are not a taxon (a group of biological classification) but constitute a polyphyletic group (that does not come from an immediate common ancestor, but from several) of organisms that are traditionally and arguably described as "lower plants". In the past they were treated as a division of the «Plant Kingdom», the Thalophyta (or Talobionta) which included fungi, algae, lichens and occasionally, the Myxomycophyta.

Sometimes called "thallous plants," as opposed to vascular plants. In the S. XIX, Stephan Ladislaus Endlicher (Austrian botanist) divided the Plant Kingdom (equivalent to the sum of the Plantae kingdoms, the plants themselves, and Fungi, the true fungi, plus a part of the Protista kingdom) into thalophytes and cormophytes (vascular plants). in 1836. The Cormophytas are also known as Cormogenas according to Lindely's system.--> The term is obsolete, because it does not correspond to a group of the taxonomic classification of living beings, nor to a biotype, it would correspond to an evolutionary "grade", a concept of very limited utility once the teleological notion of scale of being

Thallophytes are algae (autotrophs that are not plants and belong to the kingdom of protists), fungi (currently fungi are not classified as plants but constitute their own kingdom, called kingdom Fungi), lichens (symbiotic associations of algae with fungi) and bryophytes.

In thallophytes, reproduction takes place by simple dissociation of stem cells, and also by spores, or by conjugation, through gametes, sometimes equal (isogamy) or unequal (heterogamy), fixed or mobile, which pass insensitive to true sexual reproduction. The differentiated male organ is the antheridium, and the female is the oogonium; the antheridium produces the antherozoids or male cells, and the oogonium produces the oosphere or female cell.