So if you look at a tiny blade of grass and a gigantic tree its like looking at a Chihuahua and a brachiosaurus. And there are smaller things and bigger things in the aminal kingdum!
Same for roots, btw, just earlier.
I think palm trees are a kind of grass
I didn’t know that and I agree
I’m firmly in this camp.
I’m a billion years, crabs will start turning into trees and trees into crabs. merging into the ubercreature
I imagine it’ll look like paras
I’m a billion years
Damn. You look good for your age.
I’d argue, but I agree. I don’t need to know how they look, if they’re a billion years and capable of communicating, whatever state they’re in looks good. Even if its a fungus posessed rot monster.
Like a tree, for example.
“ubercreature” excuse me, lichen would like a word with you
you may not like it but Ms Crabtree is what peak performance looks like
Also cool that for a period of like 60 million years, nothing decomposed dead trees. As they would die or fall over, they’d just stay there, piling up. This is where most oil came from. The massive amounts of trees stacking up before bacteria and fungus evolved to decomposed them. Imagine 60 million years worth of trees just lying around.
Mushrooms are the great undertaker, the great decomposer. The Langoliers. They are just waiting to eat you, and they’re happy to share their fruits in the meantime. They’re fattening you up. They can wait.
I imagine dead trees were flammable, even back then. And oxygen levels were 15% higher. Can you imagine the forest fires?
deleted by creator
Didn’t those trees become coal, not oil?
I think near water they became oil and far from water they became coal
No, most coal comes from plants in swamps, because the water helped preserve the organic matter.
Plants in swamps die -> organic matter on the bottom of the swamp -> peat -> brown coal -> black coal.
Oil apparently comes mostly from plankton.
On the different origins: https://www.carboeurope.org/how-are-fossil-fuels-formed-the-science-behind-oil-coal-and-natural-gas/
Cool
Oil was effectively plankton and other sea stuff.
Coal was forests.
I love this fact, and am curious where you learned it?
I learned it nearly 30 years ago in school. I just did a search and found a link about it, though.
Also, seems that either I remembered wrongly, or my teacher made a mistake, but it seems it was most of the worlds coal; not oil, that came from all the piles of trees from that period.
Its basically just the best way to be a large plant if you’re not gonna be a big parasitic ivy. Once your plant circulatory system gets complex enough to send stuff further away, you start getting big enough that you need hard tissues just to stop yourself from folding over.
So that’s why every stargate planet looks like Canada
Sadly Lemmy isn’t big enough to support niche communities, but I really enjoyed r/unexpectedstargate back in the day.
🤣🤣🤣
Also, no such thing as fish.
Google it.
Impossible. If there were no such thing as fish, how could bees be fish?
I don’t have the tools to know how to respond to this comment. You win.
Edit: Holy shit. I just did a quick google. Boydster is not shitting us. Just google “bees are fish.” Oddly enough, this actually furthers the thesis of fish not existing.
Beavers are also fish.
I don’t have the tools to know how to respond to this comment. You win.
This is the best way I’ve ever seen utter befuddlement expressed. Chapeau!
To add on for anyone who is lazy like me, the thing where Google summarizes says California has classified bees as fish under an environmental protection act. According to the first result (Reddit) it’s because fish is a catch all term in that law. Instead of listing all the animals they just use fish. Because fish,bees, and the other animals are all invertebrates.
Now whoever reads this has three Lemmy comments, a reddit thread reference, and an ai overview reference as some solid sources
Fish are vertebrates they have a backbone
Some fish are, yeah
Sorry bro, all fish are vertebrates
While I understand it is an arbitrary classification system designed by humans, one of the defining factors of fish is that they are verrebrate.
What a nicely packaged little subthread to come across while decompressing after a super busy day, lol!
Fish are vertebrates they have a backbone
My sister in law recently quipped that “Trees are a social construct” and at first I thought she was just being glib but now I can’t get that statement out of my head.
I listen to a podcast called Completely Arbortrary. They talk about a different tree species each episode. They say trees are a strategy, not a strict definition.
Thanks! Just subscribed. See they have a couple Metasequoia episodes -a favorite of mine .
Trees are like every other plant, ONLY MORE SO
here’s a cool blog post that expands on this There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
i didn’t even put it in a bookmark folder, it’s just loose on my bookmark bar because it’s such an interesting post that i reread from time to time
That was a very fun and interesting reading! Thanks for sharing
Maybe…but I doubt many of these phylogenies use DNA, and if so, likely only a single or few genes. Nowhere near enough resolution to accurately determine genetic relatedness. Woody plants may actually be more related than we think.
These sorts of phylogenies tend to use morphological characteristics which is an unreliable measure of genetic relatedness.
I will stand corrected if wrong though
Had to look it up because I didnt beleive
sure enough its correct
Something poetic and quaint about a link to a Wikipedia article titled “Tree”
reddit has broken me. I was expecting it to point to weed.
I was expecting an undirected acyclic graph.
Yo momma so fat she sat on a binary tree and squashed it into a linked list in O(1) time.
Here you go.
Reddit has broken me. I was expecting a rickroll
sooo glad I wasn’t alone.
anyhow, here’s a fun song.
Unsurpassable power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabtree
Not to be confused with Dryococelus aka the “tree lobster”
Now we just need crabs to evolve a treecrab and we can have the two battle for the ultimate life form
Good moaning!
The absolute peak of evolution. Everyone, go home.
Its called convergent evolution and you also have some shit you wouldnt believe that makes all apes similar to us.
Apes are so similar to us because we came from a common ancestor. I’d love to hear if there are traits we evolved independently after we split though.
Hit me. I love evolutionary fun facts.
smackkk
Well humans are a type of great ape, sooooll
I’m more of a middling ape myself honestly
The genus Cornus is a huge middle finger to growth-form-based taxonomy. It contains dogwood trees and also bunchberry, an itty bitty herb that grows on the forest floor.
The first “trees” were also lycopods whose closest extant relatives are the club mosses, a name which gives you an idea of how big they get. All the coal in the world is from a period where plants figured out wood before decomposers learned how to break it down and is mainly the result of a bunch of lycopod trunks sinking into peat bugs and slowly getting compressed.
We use a specific type of Lycopodium as a control group to calculate pollen counts and various other metrics in palaeoecology. It’s pollen is super distinct.
