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
Or maybe the microorganisms and food sources that life forms are exposed to have more of an effect on how the macroorganisms evolve than is currently talked about, which would explain why so many things in similar environments evolve similar traits.
I wasn’t ready for how weird this comment section turned out to be…
There are fern trees, conifer trees, and flowering trees. Where are my moss trees?
Same for roots, btw, just earlier.
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
Paras is a fungus. Totally different thing.
Ah you’re right. Torterra then
Torterra is a tortoise. Totally different thing.
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
lichen is the shit
you may not like it but Ms Crabtree is what peak performance looks like
I think palm trees are a kind of grass
So is corn
And banana
I didn’t know that and I agree
I’m firmly in this camp.
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!
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.
I thought that was coal
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 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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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.
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.
By the logic we are not humans…
no, we didn’t have mice and also ants evolve into humans… there’s one distinct line of ancestors…
it’s called convergent evolution. check out wikipedia
So that’s why every stargate planet looks like Canada
That and every Stargate planet is Vancouver
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 ❤️
🤣🤣🤣
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
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
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 .
