 yeah moss is great but how about a vascular plant that has basically ... gone back to the way of the moss... Azorella compacta It's... it's a carrot that has given up on having leaves... Imagine a hostile planet with plants like this... could you tell that they once grew in less cold and arid climates? What if flora of the twilight days of a planet look like the earliest life... but when you look closer there are abilities, and structures that tell their history.... 19 comments
@futurebird oh, that’s supposed to be great duck food for your backyard ducks! They love to eat it and it grows exponentially fast in stagnant water. Nono this isn't duckweed or azolla. It's so much weirder! 😀 https://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/05/yareta-3000-years-old-plant.html @violetmadder @futurebird WOW!! 😮 that’s so cool, even cooler than duckweed indeed!! Thanks!   Interesting, it's on the same lines as there's no such thing as a tree. Only more so. I love that stuff so very much. It's like a special precious pokemon that should never, ever be hurt. Nobody touch it.  I think the bulbous roots are long gone... and many members of this family are poisonous... though I have no idea about this one. @futurebird I got all excited thinking this was the "star plant" that made me so happy when I was trekking in Ecuador, but the range and altitude didn't quite match. Turns out I was looking for Plantago rigida, which looks very similar, because apparently convergent evolution gave us a number of plant families with hardy little high-altitude cushion plants like this. TIL!   @futurebird and then there's Punotia lagopus. I took this photo from a bus driving by https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20185839 but there are better shots out there. It just looks like a pale boulder. Only 20 observations on iNaturalist, probably because nobody realizes they are looking at a plant.  @futurebird I saw these llareta in Atacama and they were absolutely incredible. Alien. (They’re endangered now because they grow so slowly and miners harvested them for fuel)  @futurebird I still don’t understand what the structure is underneath. Looks like stems, but maybe really tightly packed.  @futurebird Wikipedia link for those who want to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yareta |
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@futurebird yeah structure is knowledge bird up