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.
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?
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!
Now we do the dance of joy!
I remember a flimsy tv film with even flimsier CGI spherical creatures eating the planet
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
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.
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
“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.
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
you may not like it but Ms Crabtree is what peak performance looks like
I think palm trees are a kind of grass
I didn’t know that and I agree
So is corn
And banana
And bamboo
I’m firmly in this camp.
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
Same for roots, btw, just earlier.
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
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.
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 vertebrates.
What about starfishes? Checkmate.
Source?
Because all the sources I’ve come across say that “fish” is not a monophylatic classification and is essentially arbitrary.
What a nicely packaged little subthread to come across while decompressing after a super busy day, lol!
Fish are vertebrates they have a backbone
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!
Beavers are also fish.
This is like the whole, “triceratops didn’t exist, it’s just a young Torosaurus” thing all over again. My world can’t handle this!
Then what are the dolphins thankful for?
A large variety of aquatic phylogeny that is edible and nutritious for a carnivorous aquatic mammalian diet.
Admittedly it’s going to be harder to put into a show tune, but I’m sure they’ll come up with some catchy names.
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 awe’d though!
Concentrated sun energy sinks
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.
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.
That’s super neat. Is that little triangular bit at the top a germ pore or something else? It’s funny how you get one clade that takes what you’d think would be a really optimizable form like a spore or a pollen grain and takes a left turn with it. In fungi, Entolomas are really identifiable because their spores are pink and cube shaped.
The Y like structure comes from their formation in a sort of honeycomb cluster of 4. This structure makes them easy to break off from the host and also provides a weak point for germination. :) I wish I could differentiate fungal spores, I see a lot of them.
Oof, I do not envy anyone trying to identify fungi through the fossil record. Color and fruiting body structure tend to play pretty big roles in ID because the spores themselves tend to be small and fragile, so except for a few genera that are known for highly ornamented spores it can be pretty challenging.
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!
It’s also mindblowing that chihuahua and tibetan mastiff belong to the same species even tho they look entirely different.
also that humans did that is wild
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
Trees are like every other plant, ONLY MORE SO
