Evolutionary Claim: 

Over many millions of years, descendants of the first primitive cell diversified into numerous lines of descent. One or more of these lines gave rise to Land Plants.

Reality Check:

(Unless otherwise noted, quotations below  are from the book by Henry Morris, That Their Words May Be Used Against Them, available from the Institute for Creation Research. Links are to articles and papers on the World Wide Web.)

Smith, Peter J., "Evolution’s Most Worrisome Questions," review of Life Pulse by Niles Eldredge (Fact on File, 1987, 246 pp.), New Scientist (November 19, 1987), p. 59.

p. 59
"Eldredge and Gould, by contrast, decided to take the record at face value. On this view, there is little evidence of modification within species, or of forms intermediate between species because neither generally occurred. A species forms and evolves almost instantaneously (on the geological timescale) and then remains virtually unchanged until it disappears, yielding its habitat to a new species."

Axelrod, Daniel I., "Evolution of the Psilophyte Paleoflora," Evolution, vol. 13 (June 1959), pp. 264-275. Axelrod was at the University of California, Los Angeles.

p. 270
"Since vascular land plants had already attained some diversity of type by the Early Cambrian, their earlier evolution must have taken place in Precambrian time." 

[Read here, roughly translated, There is no trace of the evolution of vascular plants before their sudden appearance in a variety of  forms in the Early Cambrian strata].

p. 272
"Judging from the inferred nature of Cambrian land plants, the late Proterozoic land flora may have been nearly as complex as that which has been preserved in the Late Silurian to Middle Devonian rocks. But rather than being in the low lands, it probably was in the more distant uplands of environmental diversity, areas propitious for rapid evolution."

Gensel, Patricia G., and Henry N. Andrews, "The Evolution of Early Land Plants," American Scientist, vol. 75 (September/October 1987), pp. 478-489.

p. 478
"It was not until the Silurian period, 400 to 450 million years ago, that plants and some animals adapted to a land environment and became well established there.

"Vascular land plants—that is, plants with distinctive water-conducting tissues, as opposed to nonvascular plants such as mosses—became established by mid-Silurian times and diversified relatively rapidly in the early Devonian period." [Emphasis added] 

[Roughly translated, "diversified relatively rapidly" means, appeared suddenly in a variety of forms.]

p. 481
"We still lack any precise information concerning the presumed aquatic ancestors from which land plants evolved, and the search for evidence of these precursors and of probable transitional stages continues…. Further fossil evidence is needed to test these ideas and to determine whether the transition was sudden or gradual."

p. 487
"During the Carboniferous, some Iycophytes achieved heights well in excess of 30 m, and such specimens became a dominant element in the great Upper Carboniferous coal swamps. These types declined rapidly toward the end of the Carboniferous, while the smaller, herbaceous forms continued on to the present time."

Anonymous, "Ancient Alga Fossil Most Complex Yet," Science News, vol. 108 (September 20, 1975), p. 181.

p. 181
"Both blue-green algae and bacteria fossils dating back 3.4 billion years have been found in rocks from S. Africa."

p. 181
"Even more intriguing, the pleurocapsalean algae turned out to be almost identical to modern pleurocapsalean algae at the family and possibly even at the generic level." 

p. 181
"Do the Harvard paleontologists’ findings shed any light on the origin of eukaryotes [cells with nuclei] from prokaryotes [cells without nuclei]: Probably not."

p. 181
"In brief, as Barghoorn puts it, ‘We have no really good evidence from all of the Precambrian records … of a genuine eukaryotic cell.

Creationist claims of Precambrian pollen in the Grand Canyon do not appear to stand up under investigation. (However, although there may not be evidence for Precambrian pollen in the Grand Canyon, there is one thoroughly documented report of the occurrence of pollen and vascular tissue of higher plants which does support the existence of angiosperms earlier in the fossil record).

Arnold, C. A., An Introduction to Paleobotany (Michigan: McGraw-Hill, 1949), 433 pp.

p. 7
"It has long been hoped that extinct plants will ultimately reveal some of the stages through which existing groups have passed during the course of their development, but it must be freely admitted that this aspiration has been fulfilled to a very slight extent, even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred years. As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present." [Emphasis added]

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