According to the fossil record, flowering plants appeared only about 140 million years ago, although some recently found fossil evidence suggests that they appeared 80 million years before that. (The earliest land plants, blue-green algae, appeared perhaps 1.2 billion years ago.) The angiosperms now dominate the world's vegetation. Only the gymnosperms offer any substantial competition. There may be more than 250,000 angiosperm species, compared to fewer than 1,000 gymnosperm species and fewer than about 40,000 other types of vascular plants (ferns and their relatives) and bryophytes (liverworts, mosses, hornworts). There are fewer than 15,000 species of algae and perhaps more than 100,000 species of fungi and bacteria.