Vol. 9 No. 4 (2019): Revista Biodiversidad Neotropical

In the tropical rainforest (Bp-T) there are tree ferns of the genus Cyathea, the oldest seedless vascular plants on the planet, which is why they are called living fossils. Nowadays they are widely distributed and found in tropical and subtropical areas of the Americas where they exploit a wide variety of ecosystems, from sea level to 4.200 m elevation. In Colombia, this genus is composed of more than 122 species, making it the country with the greatest diversity in this group, and about 30% of these are found in the forests of the Colombian Pacific coast (Cárdenas et al. 2019, Bernal et al. 2015).