what's the dumbest piece of plant anatomy. where do you look at a plant and you're like "why did evolution do this instead of literally anything else"
hmm…this is a tough one because there aren’t many plant evolutionary traits i think are flat out stupid? like theres at least like one a week that makes me shit bricks, but id say with 99% of plant stuff i can at least see how it got to the conclusion of making a certain structure, and most of the time its something way smarter than i would have come up with if i was like, god or something.
the closest i can think of would be something from back before plants figured out literally anything….i know ive talked about this a few months ago, but i really can’t get over a variety of extinct plants. currently my favorite from the dawn of plants on land is Aglaophyton major, a plant that was around 410 million years ago and was in the stage where plant anatomy was shifting from a primitive upright stem sprouting from a thallus (hornwort style) to a stem creeping along the ground.
this is literally so embarrassing. humans finding fossils of this is analogous to mankind as a whole accidentally walking in on someone in the public restroom of life.
we dont know how many plant species we’ll never get to see from this time period, but the current idea is that there were hundreds to thousands of different ‘tries’ to get plant life on earth right, all mutations and species that are 100% lost to the sands of time; only the more successful ones are the ones that got fossilized and, as a result, dug up and studied more often. now, given that, can you imagine the chances of Land Plant v. 2.5 (Noodle Update) getting fossilized and dug up by scientists 410 million years later? like don’t get me wrong, there’s no doubt that getting from ‘straight primitive stem’ to ‘creeping, more adaptable stem’ was necessary for life as we know it today, but there are probably hundreds of other, less embarrassing stages/attempts of plant evolution that weren’t this hilarious that would have at least afforded the decency of not showing a far ancestor of plant life on land engaging in spaghetti time. its so funny. i just cant believe it
