It always staggers me when I remember that for roughly sixty million years during the Carboniferous Period, there were trees but no microorganisms capable of decomposing them.
Just sixty million years of branches falling off and trees falling down and… just sitting there on the ground, not rotting at all.
Now consider wild fires during that period.
Fire hadn’t been invented yet.
they said “wild fires”
just like wild horses, wild fires existed long before they were domesticated.
You just ruined the song.
Was the world turning though?
Not the song I mean, but thanks for the ear worm.
they must have been wild
Note that although species can be described as tree-like, they didn’t quite look like modern trees do. Also, much of the world was swamp, and much of the dead plant material sank into these bogs and decayed into peat.
The amount of CO2 trapped during this period caused the atmosphere to be around 35% oxygen. This allowed life with inefficient respiratory systems to grow much bigger in size without suffocating, mainly insects. Think woodlice 6 feet long, spiders the size of dogs, millipedes as big as cars, and dragonflies as big as eagles.
Think woodlice 6 feet long, spiders the size of dogs, millipedes as big as cars, and dragonflies as big as eagles.
No, I don’t think I will
It was a lot more fun to believe that coal was crushed dinosaurs.
We have oil for that
but imagine you’ve just gotten use to living on a moss planet over the past 40 million years, and now all of a sudden you walk outside and all the moss is gone
The ocean was purple once, and another time the only thing taller than little bushes were twenty foot tall mushrooms shaped like asparagus
Ok now, I get that it’s a theory but you can’t just assume this one is 100.
Fortunately, there was no thinking until a very long time after that.
Well, not by life indigenous to Earth, anyway.
Hey! Those are my ancestors you’re dissing you know
FWIW a lot of “moss” from that time was very unlike what we think of as moss today.
I want to see a visualization of this now.
Good attempt, but there wouldn’t be bushes, right?
Maybe more like this:
That one looks pretty cool!
That moss have been long and painful to wait for this.
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You’re thinking about this like it’s just a single uniform endless pasture of gray-green moss. But you have to recognize all the moss is competing for space and resources.
So you’ve got 40M years of different kinds of mosses all developing novel evolutionary strategies as they try to one up one another. Just a rainforest of mosses, with an uncountable variation of shapes and colors and compositions.
Moss bushes. Moss trees. Hanging mosses. Floating mosses. Dense spongey moss. Brilliantly colored moss. Poisoned moss. Cannibal moss. Stinging moss. Velvety moss. Venus Fly Moss. Moss of a thousand different color variants.
And every few hundred years, you get a new moss meta strategy for being the best kind of moss that pushes all the other moss out. Played across 40M years, it’s this big squirling fractual of warring moss tribes, until finally another organism figures out the optimal play on all moss and then it’s over as fast as it started.
I would play this game. Like spore, but just moss
yesterday someone posted a closeup of moss on a street to show how fascinating it is. i can’t find it anymore, but it was cool. maybe somebody still has that picture?
Edit:
Go to Iceland and there are huge fields of lava rocks covered in a thick yellow-greenish moss because there isn’t enough soil for anything else to grow. It is surreal and probably what most of the earth looked like for those 40 million years
Yes. Seconding and insisting you drive to this restaurant in the Westfjords. I hated seafood until I went here and it broke me. I now love seafood.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g189967-d1099110-Reviews-Tjoruhusid-Isafjordur_Westfjords_Region.html 5.0 at almost 900 reviews for a reason. It’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, literally hours and hours to get here.
Also !mosses@mander.xyz
Is difficult to take such an interesting fact seriously when is presented in such a stupid way.
Sorry, sir. Will only present you interesting facts in a serious manner from now on.
Interesting facts in a stupid way or stupid facts in an interesting way. We only have enough for 50%.
happy Kris noises
Certainly not all land of earth. Moss requires moisture to survive and lacks the root system of developed plants to get water deep in the soil.
We stand no chance against the mighty moss
