theres also a definition of a what a tree in the sense , its develops wood, many things are tree like, but not trees: such as palms(just overgrown herbs), dracaena( aka cabbage tree, they have something dracenoid thickining.) extinct plants like giant lycophytes and ferns
Concentrated sun energy sinks
I’m a billion years, crabs will start turning into trees and trees into crabs. merging into the ubercreature
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.
I wish, I’m only a crab, trying to become a tree
I imagine it’ll look like paras
Paras is a fungus. Totally different thing.
Ah you’re right. Torterra then
Torterra is a tortoise. Totally different thing.
Maybe Pantera?
Pantera is large cats
“ubercreature” excuse me, lichen would like a word with you
lichen is the shit
appreciate when a symbiote becomes it’s own thing.
the tree of life isn’t meant to merge branches,
Eukaryotes, corals, lychens, probably the same with chlorophyll.
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.
*Thought I’d add an edit, since this post got quite a few eyes on it: It was mostly coal that all those trees turned into. Not oil.
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.
That Langoliers reference spotted in the wild!
I remember a flimsy tv film with even flimsier CGI spherical creatures eating the planet
Now we do the dance of joy!
I was struggling to explain the plot of this one to my gf just the other day. Had to pull out screenshots of the TV movie to make it make sense.
I thought that was coal
Didn’t those trees become coal, not oil?
Yes. I made mention of this in a reply to someone else as well. I’m not sure if my teacher (like 30 years ago) told us wrong or if I simply remembered it wrong.
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.
Brother I finally found you.
We come from the same place you and me. Remember that barn?
I imagine dead trees were flammable, even back then. And oxygen levels were 15% higher. Can you imagine the forest fires?
Fire wasn’t invented back then
And after it was invented, it was only in black and white until the 1950s
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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.
Correct. In theory, we could make more oil in the lab. We cannot make more coal, because the wood will get broken down by bacteria far before it turns to peat, lignite, sub-bituminous, or bituminous coal, and much less anthracite.
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.
Here you go.
Reddit has broken me. I was expecting a rickroll
sooo glad I wasn’t alone.
anyhow, here’s a fun song.
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.
is a binary tree equivalent to a 2D KD-tree ?
That happens to me constantly
Scishow had an episode about it a week ago. It’s a strategy, not a species.
I wasn’t ready for how weird this comment section turned out to be…
Based on your username, you should be used to weird shit.
Doesn’t mean I can’t still be aww’d though!
There are fern trees, conifer trees, and flowering trees. Where are my moss trees?
Except clubmoss isn’t moss iirc? They’re vascular and more of a fern than moss.
Shhhh hahaha
I think palm trees are a kind of grass
So is corn
And banana
And bamboo
I didn’t know that and I agree
I’m firmly in this camp.
Same for roots, btw, just earlier.
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.
Isn’t big enough yet ❤️
That and every Stargate planet is Vancouver
🤣🤣🤣
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
Very cool read, thank you
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
Nature likes things that turn hard- Wait what?
Weren’t there like, several millions of years where trees evolved but nothing had come yet to break down wood, so like, generations of dead forest just fell on top of each other until some fungus was like “that looks yummy”?
The molecule is called lignin. And yes, there was a good 60 million years before that particular problem was cracked.
Next is plastics
First, we bio-engineer bacteria and fungi to prefer plastic as food.
Second, these bacteria become a serious endopathogen in the human body while scavenging our precious bodily microplastics.
Third, we engineer a bacteriophage to attack the bacteria in our brains.
Fourth…
The whole human comedy just keeps going and going
The beautiful part is that when wintertime rolls around the gorillas simply freeze to death
Exactly the reference I thought of reading this
I know an old woman who swallowed a fly…
Yes, that’s when coal comes from. There were giant global fire storms, because of all the dead trees and also because there was more oxygen. The oxygen also caused insects to become gigantic. They don’t have lungs, just random holes in their body so the airs oxygen content limits their size.
we’re living through a similar period but with plastics :)
It’s the circle of life. Plastics are a petrochemical, and those trees created our coal.
Now plastics weren’t technically evolved (unless you count human evolution)…but at least we got CRISPR to maybe speed things along with “evolving” a plastics predator.
i dont really know why human activity should be special. it’s evolved creatures doing weird shit, producing (temporarily?) undigestible stuff. there’s no rule saying you cant have the production outside your body, it’s just customary to use organs.
Yes, that is how we got coal.
u might be onto something, this thread sent me down the rabbit hole and penises have evolved independently at least 6 times
I always liked the idea of being a tree like life form.
Imagine looking down at a bunch of cute little things crawling all over you for hundreds of years and then one day one of them shows up with an axe
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 .
