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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 29th, 2023
  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•mossussyEnglish
    9·
    24 days ago

    this isn’t a moss. it’s probably lycopodium, and is not a bryophyte. It’s distantly related (but like, so are ferns, horsetails, and basically all vascular plants, and we also don’t exactly know how).

    Basically, mosses don’t have roots because they don’t have a vascular system. Not the mention the whole ploidy inversion that goes a long with that.

    More on the ploidy...

    More on the ploidy…

    In mosses the “big green part we largely consider to be the plant” is actually the haploid phase. So in human equivalent terms, the plant part is equivalent to our sperm or eggs in ploidy. (even though it’s possible this evolved independently).

    In lycopodium, they’re on the other side of the n/2n “flip” that happened in ancient evolutionary history.

    Basically the same reproductive system for all vascular plants. Its not even clear evolved that this evolved from the bryophytes, with some arguing that the evolution of tracheids in the 2n generation likely occured with hornworts, which like, probably most people wouldn’t even visually be able to distinguish from bryophytes? Anyways, their 2n sexual structures do have tracheary elements and rely on wetting and drying cycles to disperse sexual propagules. So the argument goes that the 2n dominant generation evolved from something like a hornwort, not the more familiar bryophytes.