It's because there's so much of them plants have been able to survive the five major mass extinction events that regularly decimated animal life on the Earth for over millions of years.

A study published in the journal New Phytologist shows plant diversity was hardly affected during Earth's mass extinction events or biotic crises. It pointed out that plants have been incredibly resilient through the five mass extinctions and that plants played an important role in shaping the terrestrial environments for over 400 million years.

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Researchers analyzed over 20,000 plant fossils as they sought to understand the effects of mass extinction on plant diversity, said Daniele Silvestro of the University of Gothenburg's Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences in Sweden, who led the study.

They found negative rates of diversification in plants were never persistent over long periods of time, meaning plants were better at surviving and recovering compared to animals.

"In the plant kingdom, mass extinction events can be seen as opportunities for turnover leading to renewed biodiversity," said Silvestro.

As an example, flowering plants (angiosperms) underwent rapid increases in their diversity immediately following the asteroid impact off the coast of Mexico 66 million years ago that wiped-out the dinosaurs and also ended the reign of gymnosperms (spruce, pines and firs) as the Earth's dominant plant species.

Co-author Alexandre Antonelli noted that mass extinctions are often thought of as a bad thing, "but they have been crucial in changing the world into how we know it today".

"By studying such extreme events we are trying to learn which groups of organisms and features are more sensitive to changes, so that we can apply this knowledge to protect biodiversity in the face of on-going climate change and human deterioration of natural ecosystems," said Antonelli.

The Earth's five major extinction events are the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, 66 million years ago; Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, 201.3 million years ago; Permian-Triassic extinction event, 252 million years ago (or The Great Dying, Earth's greatest extinction event); Late Devonian extinction event, 375 to 360 million years ago and Ordovician-Silurian extinction event, 450 to 440 million years ago.