Cocos nucifera Linnaeus, 1753 - coconut from a coconut palm (public display, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA)

Plants are multicellular, photosynthesizing eucaryotes. Most species occupy terrestrial environments, but they also occur in freshwater and saltwater aquatic environments. The oldest known land plants in the fossil record are Ordovician to Silurian. Land plant body fossils are known in Silurian sedimentary rocks - they are small and simple plants (e.g., Cooksonia). Fossil root traces in paleosol horizons are known in the Ordovician. During the Devonian, the first trees and forests appeared. Earth's initial forestation event occurred during the Middle to Late Paleozoic. Earth's continents have been partly to mostly covered with forests ever since the Late Devonian. Occasional mass extinction events temporarily removed much of Earth's plant ecosystems - this occurred at the Permian-Triassic boundary (251 million years ago) and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (65 million years ago).

The most conspicuous group of living plants is the angiosperms, the flowering plants. They first unambiguously appeared in the fossil record during the Cretaceous. They quickly dominated Earth's terrestrial ecosystems, and have dominated ever since. This domination was due to the evolutionary success of flowers, which are structures that greatly aid angiosperm reproduction.

Coconuts are only produced by one species of tree - the coconut palm. Coconut palm trees are widespread along and near most tropical to subtropical, Old World and New World and Oceanic coastlines. They appear to have originated in the western and southwestern Pacific and were later introduced to the New World by Europeans.

Coconut trees have moderately thick, mostly subcylindrical, linear to curvilinear, upright to tilted trunks. The crown consists of several, very long, highly segmented leaf blades. Leaf blade segments arise from a very prominent midrib. Coconuts are the fruit of this tree. They are large, irregularly rounded, and green to yellowish-brown to brown in color, depending on the degree of ripeness.

Classification: Plantae, Angiospermophyta, Arecales, Arecaceae/Palmae

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