Lycophytes, Quillworts & the "Great Dying"

<v Speaker 1>All right, welcome to another episode of the Crime PAGs,
<v Speaker 1>but Bodany doesn't podcast. Today, I have a guest who
<v Speaker 1>studies a really weird and cool and obscure lineage of
<v Speaker 1>plants that not many people are familiar with. So Jeff
<v Speaker 1>Benk everybody, Hello, Hello Jeff, how you doing. Let's talk
<v Speaker 1>about lycophytes.
<v Speaker 2>Hi joy, Great to be on the great to be
<v Speaker 2>on the podcast. Thanks for biting me.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, man, yeah, well you know you're you're a specialist.
<v Speaker 1>And then a really really cool lineage that uh yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>that I'm that I'm always seeing when I'm out in
<v Speaker 1>the desert, like selaginella, the spike moss is, don't They're
<v Speaker 1>fucking so weird and so cool. They're all you know
<v Speaker 1>whenever you see them. Most of the time in the desert.
<v Speaker 1>They're dry because the desert's dry most of the time.
<v Speaker 1>But then after they get wet, they come back to life.
<v Speaker 1>The quote unquote resurrection plant uh selaganella lepidophla that we
<v Speaker 1>get out here in West Texas. You know, you'll see
<v Speaker 1>huge mats of it, of individual rosette plants coating the
<v Speaker 1>limestone rock, and you know, they're all dry and crispy,
<v Speaker 1>and then they get wet, and I think, what within
<v Speaker 1>like thirty minutes or an hour they come back to
<v Speaker 1>life and just regreen and start photosynthesizing and metabolizing again
<v Speaker 1>or what.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, pretty much, they kind of go into a bit
<v Speaker 2>of a cryptobiotic state, so they basically just shut down
<v Speaker 2>a lot of their functions and basically preserve their organelles
<v Speaker 2>and their cells when they dry out, so they pretty
<v Speaker 2>much nearly fully desiccate, but they're basically making sure they
<v Speaker 2>preserve their functions their cells so they can reboot when
<v Speaker 2>they're rehydrated. It's absolutely fascinating, and there's tons of research
<v Speaker 2>going into just how this happens sort of on a
<v Speaker 2>cellular to basically a microscopic level, because there's I think
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of interest in trying to translate these
<v Speaker 2>sorts of traits into agricultural crops, for trying to figure
<v Speaker 2>out how people can produce food in places where it
<v Speaker 2>gets really water is a short edge, right, so there's
<v Speaker 2>quite a hot area for research right now.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, to dry out without dying and just kind
<v Speaker 1>of go dormant and hang in there, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>a lichen wood is insane but it's this is not
<v Speaker 1>the only Well. First off, let's talk about these other
<v Speaker 1>the more xeric adapted, the drought adapted ones. The Silaganella
<v Speaker 1>leptofla is you know, a beautiful rosette, you get Celaganella
<v Speaker 1>gypsy cola down a nuevo laone, which is kind of
<v Speaker 1>specialized to gypsum, has a different leaf shape. But then
<v Speaker 1>you get all these other weird ones, like there's one
<v Speaker 1>in Baja that looks like when you see it and
<v Speaker 1>it's dry, it's in that you know, Baja Chaparral, northern
<v Speaker 1>Baja California, it just looks like someone threw out, like
<v Speaker 1>someone illegally dumped like a dirty, decaying shag carpeting. It's
<v Speaker 1>just all gray and it's just but it coats the ground.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's acting like a living mulch. And then
<v Speaker 1>when it gets wet, it comes back to life and
<v Speaker 1>starts photosynthesizing again. You've got Silaganella arizonica, which is another
<v Speaker 1>one that you'll see just draped over rocks, you know,
<v Speaker 1>And a lot of these are really important for the
<v Speaker 1>germination of other plants like cacti and some shrubs, and
<v Speaker 1>you know, they just formed this whole plant community that
<v Speaker 1>it's fucking wild. I remember being in Guanajuato and looking
<v Speaker 1>at Mammalaria Andersoniana, this rare mammalaria, and it was, you know,
<v Speaker 1>so many of them were nestled in beds of Silaganella.
<v Speaker 1>I think it was a sartori but it's just a
<v Speaker 1>fucking cool ise. So you've got that, you've got the
<v Speaker 1>drought tolerant ones, the desiccation tolerant ones, but then you've
<v Speaker 1>got this whole lineage that's evolved for the shady, super
<v Speaker 1>wet jungle rainforest, et cetera.
<v Speaker 2>Right, absolutely, Yeah, So the vast majority of a lot
<v Speaker 2>of these Selaginella as a genus of Lycophytes or in
<v Speaker 2>that group, vast majority of them are in these rainforest
<v Speaker 2>understories throughout the tropics, and they've I mean, they they've
<v Speaker 2>diversified into so many species. I mean, they're one of
<v Speaker 2>the most species rich genera of seed free plants in
<v Speaker 2>the world. You know, if not the uh there's there's
<v Speaker 2>hundreds and hundreds of species of Slagnella's out there, and
<v Speaker 2>they're obscure as heck. I mean, they're really being able
<v Speaker 2>to determine which species you're dealing with for many of
<v Speaker 2>these these shade living lineages really requires you know, almost
<v Speaker 2>a lot of training and a lot of looking under
<v Speaker 2>the microscope for these minute traits on these leaves of
<v Speaker 2>plants that might look very similar over time. So it's
<v Speaker 2>it's it's fascinating, and that sort of evolution of those
<v Speaker 2>sort of xeric dry adapted slaganellas has really occurred many
<v Speaker 2>times over the span of hundreds of millions of years
<v Speaker 2>that these plants have been around. They diverged from many
<v Speaker 2>of these other lycophytes, you know back well, you know,
<v Speaker 2>hell over three hundred and sixty million years ago we're
<v Speaker 2>talking probably you know, very early on in the evolution
<v Speaker 2>of terrestrial ecosystems that you had these what we call
<v Speaker 2>heterosporus or two types of spore groups of these plants
<v Speaker 2>just splitting off from all the others.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, let's really quick. Let's let's let's fill people
<v Speaker 1>in on what we're talking These are, So these are lycophytes,
<v Speaker 1>that's a monophyletic clade consisting of the lycopods and the
<v Speaker 1>Selejianella and the isoetes, the the what's the kind of
<v Speaker 1>the quill wars, right, so there's like three main groups here,
<v Speaker 1>and but a lycophyte they reproduced by spores. But they're
<v Speaker 1>not really a ferm, they're not really a moss. They're
<v Speaker 1>their own evolutionary lineage, their own group on the terrestrial
<v Speaker 1>plant family tree. You know, what is it, Lepidodendron common
<v Speaker 1>in museums, you know that have like a Natural History
<v Speaker 1>museum's lepidodendron. The scale bark trees are a common fossil
<v Speaker 1>you'll see there. You know, I'm there's a one for
<v Speaker 1>one in the Field Museum that you know, I want.
<v Speaker 1>I wanted my room when I was a kid to
<v Speaker 1>be done up, and you know, they got like a
<v Speaker 1>whole diorama and shit, it's like the lipidods. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>these were some of the largest their modern relatives is
<v Speaker 1>some of the first large growing terrestrial plants that ever
<v Speaker 1>grace the surface of the Earth.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>They were among the first formers of forests. They were
<v Speaker 2>in certainly in the first forests back you know, in
<v Speaker 2>the Devonian period had lycophytes as part of the canopy.
<v Speaker 2>Some of these what we call lycopods. And what's wild
<v Speaker 2>is that there's thought that there's different lineages of these
<v Speaker 2>lycopods that evolved into trees, So most of those tree
<v Speaker 2>like ones back in the Paleozoic era that make up
<v Speaker 2>a huge portion of the world's coal today and altered
<v Speaker 2>the climate when they were growing by sucking up some
<v Speaker 2>CO two out of the atmosphere and de positive it
<v Speaker 2>these equatorial coal swamps. They're now still altering our climate
<v Speaker 2>through their fossilized dead remains into our atmosphere, which is
<v Speaker 2>just absolutely profound that there's like these plant lineages that
<v Speaker 2>do this over and over again in different almost reincarnations
<v Speaker 2>of like this sort of primal primal issue. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>lycopods nearly destroyed the world about three hundred and sixty
<v Speaker 2>million years ago by plunging it into a total possible
<v Speaker 2>snowball Earth that would have been but thankfully that didn't happen.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, there was volcanism still going on.
<v Speaker 1>It was just such a rapid drying and such a rapid,
<v Speaker 1>such a rapid sequestration of CO two. It just it
<v Speaker 1>holds so much CO two so quickly, could you know, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>in terms of geologic time comparatively speaking, that it it
<v Speaker 1>just it was like an anti greenhouse effect. It just
<v Speaker 1>really I mean it was that it was that big
<v Speaker 1>it almost caused an extinction.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah yeah, and then you know today they there, their
<v Speaker 2>remains are coming back and they're destroying the world in
<v Speaker 2>the opposite way now by cooking us. So it's like this,
<v Speaker 2>it's it's this really weird thing. Just solar energy that
<v Speaker 2>has been captured in the Earth is being unleashed again
<v Speaker 2>in a different manifestation. So, like, I think that's sort
<v Speaker 2>of dynamic about this. This bizarre group of plants has
<v Speaker 2>always drawn my just my research toward them is that
<v Speaker 2>there's just they had they've had such a profound impact
<v Speaker 2>on our planet, and yet they're so obscure, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>unless you're like actually walking out in habitats and arid lands,
<v Speaker 2>as you were saying, where you see them and how
<v Speaker 2>prominent they are ecologically and these amazing habitats, they're not
<v Speaker 2>the sort of thing that you think about most of
<v Speaker 2>the time walking through the city or looking you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's not like you're going to see them coming out
<v Speaker 2>of most sidewalks in most places.
<v Speaker 1>Right right, Well, just so people, just so people know
<v Speaker 1>what the thing of in picture when we're talking about them.
<v Speaker 1>So we got three major clades, right, the solaganellas, the Isohetes,
<v Speaker 1>the quill worts, which you know, like here in Texas
<v Speaker 1>enchanted rock, which is just a big, you know, pluton
<v Speaker 1>of granite that's got these ephemeral ponds. There's like an
<v Speaker 1>Isoetes species up there. It's it's the quill worts they
<v Speaker 1>call them. Looks like almost like a tiny onion, right.
<v Speaker 1>And then so you've got the Isoetes, the celaginella, and
<v Speaker 1>then the truelycopods, right, and so what what would be
<v Speaker 1>like a good example of a lycopod, because there's some
<v Speaker 1>that you get in temper regions. I remember being up
<v Speaker 1>in the up in northern Wisconsin and there was like
<v Speaker 1>this cool lycopod occurring in these Thuia oxidant tellus swamps.
<v Speaker 1>So what would be like a good How would you
<v Speaker 1>describe like one of the lycopodiums or like a podiella
<v Speaker 1>to people?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so typically I kind of describe them as like
<v Speaker 2>pipe cleaners on acid. They're basically they're almost like a
<v Speaker 2>caterpillar like plant in a way. They look almost more
<v Speaker 2>animal than plant in some manners of how their shapes
<v Speaker 2>are formed. So they basically a lot of people call
<v Speaker 2>them depending on the types. There's a lot of them
<v Speaker 2>are called club mosses and firm mosses, which is one
<v Speaker 2>of those, of course misnomers that it's like they're not
<v Speaker 2>mosses and they're nothing close to them, but they have
<v Speaker 2>basically it's like you took a conifer and you let it,
<v Speaker 2>set it loose on the ground and let it scramble
<v Speaker 2>over the ground and spread in this electric green color.
<v Speaker 2>Many of them at least, and they always branch like
<v Speaker 2>tuning forks. In some way or another, they dichotomize, and
<v Speaker 2>those dichotomies will basically create these at least in these
<v Speaker 2>sorts of lycopods, it'll create these sort of ground running
<v Speaker 2>runners that'll send up oftentimes some form of an aerial
<v Speaker 2>shoot that'll have little spore cones that are super durable.
<v Speaker 2>They're almost like candlesticks. And so yeah, I mean, they
<v Speaker 2>really are these extremely plastic, rambling, scrambling plants that in
<v Speaker 2>many cases will be in bright sunlit environments. Though there
<v Speaker 2>are certainly some like what we call Hoypersia and herpersioids
<v Speaker 2>as a group, these fermases where they branch like true
<v Speaker 2>tuning forks, where they're they're literally they have what we
<v Speaker 2>call equal dichotomies, where every branch branches kind of like
<v Speaker 2>a whisk burn or a wishbone into two equal branches.
<v Speaker 2>And so they'll grow oftentimes in tufts in forest understories
<v Speaker 2>and leafy forest under stories of broadley forests. And then
<v Speaker 2>in the tropics, the vast majority of those species in
<v Speaker 2>that family, like a podiac are many of them are
<v Speaker 2>pendent epiphytes that grow in tropical trees.
<v Speaker 1>They look like these green really like a pipe clean
<v Speaker 1>on acid is really that's a really good way to
<v Speaker 1>put it. You know, you got like a podium anotonym,
<v Speaker 1>which you get up there in Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula Michigan,
<v Speaker 1>even greenland up in the northern latitudes, and then the
<v Speaker 1>Dominican Republic. You know, I remember seeing some there. I
<v Speaker 1>remember seeing a shit ton of New Zealand too. Oh
<v Speaker 1>Lycopodiella is like really weird. And so they look like
<v Speaker 1>this green pipe cleaner. But then when they're getting ready
<v Speaker 1>to sporulate, they make this little yellow strobolists that cone
<v Speaker 1>and then you know, you could tap it and it
<v Speaker 1>actually sends spores out. But so they that's another weird
<v Speaker 1>thing we should talk about with the silaganella's and ice
<v Speaker 1>in the ice oweedies. I guess we'll talk about that later.
<v Speaker 1>But they're heterosporus, which is, you know, people don't know
<v Speaker 1>what that means. It's basically male and female sportes. But
<v Speaker 1>the lycopodiums, though, are homosperous, right, just all the same sports,
<v Speaker 1>just like ferns and mosses.
<v Speaker 2>That's correct. Yeah, okay, so they are homospers.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, so super super regardless, super diverse group. And
<v Speaker 1>it's it's all over you know, hot, humid, cold, and
<v Speaker 1>high latitude whatever, it's they're everywhere, the lycopodiums.
<v Speaker 2>They are, they are, and yeah, there's there's a wide
<v Speaker 2>range of tolerances as you're saying. I mean they're from
<v Speaker 2>the Arctic to the tropics. I mean, it's really incredible,
<v Speaker 2>and it's almost you know, they almost would They certainly
<v Speaker 2>were in Antarctica before it was glaciated, but they now
<v Speaker 2>get about as far south as you can get in
<v Speaker 2>Tarotl Fuego. I mean, they're often found in the heats
<v Speaker 2>down there and wind swept areas, and they're right on
<v Speaker 2>the edges of glaciers and it's been that way in
<v Speaker 2>the fossil record too. If you go back about you know,
<v Speaker 2>about three hundred sixty million years ago, back to the carboniphoros,
<v Speaker 2>there are lycophytes that seem to be kind of on
<v Speaker 2>the verge of the glacial fields in what used to
<v Speaker 2>be these glaciated poles back then. So they've had they
<v Speaker 2>certainly have this ability, and many of them do tolerate
<v Speaker 2>growing in cooler environments, like I think they're centers of
<v Speaker 2>diversity today are at elevation in the tropics, so in
<v Speaker 2>sort of montane zones, mid elevations of tropical regions of
<v Speaker 2>Central and South America, I think where you get the
<v Speaker 2>most of them. But you know, the highest concentrations in
<v Speaker 2>parts of Southeast Asia and through Africa are going to
<v Speaker 2>be pretty much on mountains, like at mid elevation where
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of rain.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, these are not most of these are. Most
<v Speaker 1>of the Lyca podiums are not desiccation tolerant like solagino.
<v Speaker 2>It is correct. There are certainly some that have quite
<v Speaker 2>a tolerance and a preference for growing in habitats that
<v Speaker 2>get pretty dry in the summer. So many of the
<v Speaker 2>alpine sorts of club mosses, there's a there's a genus
<v Speaker 2>called die Fasiastrum that are basically called the ground cedars,
<v Speaker 2>and they have almost this plastic like, you know, structures
<v Speaker 2>to their their branches. They they really have these these
<v Speaker 2>leaves that are almost fused to the branch and look
<v Speaker 2>like little scales coming off them. They're absolutely gorgeous and
<v Speaker 2>you can see them if you're hiking at elevation, I
<v Speaker 2>mean near where I live here in the Cascades. You
<v Speaker 2>can find them at elevation on ski slopes or you know,
<v Speaker 2>going high up in the alpine sloane. They'll often be
<v Speaker 2>tangled with mats of heats basically any sort of heathers
<v Speaker 2>that live up here, but it'll often be very dry
<v Speaker 2>peat that they'll be growing on in dry clayey substrates
<v Speaker 2>coming out of hill sides, on the sides of trails,
<v Speaker 2>so it's quite a They really like a lot of air,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of air movement. And the wonderful thing about
<v Speaker 2>them too is oftentimes they're they're quite a nice indicator
<v Speaker 2>that you're in a habitat that has either I guess
<v Speaker 2>from a human perspective, is pretty pleasant to be in oftentimes,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, minus some of the steamy sort of swamps
<v Speaker 2>where it'll be really hot and really sticky. Many of
<v Speaker 2>them grow in very breezy, you know, mountainous, well lit,
<v Speaker 2>you know, really beautiful habitats that are nice to be
<v Speaker 2>So that's a plus if you're studying them.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, I saw they phase the ast from scariolsam
<v Speaker 1>in New Zealand on the slope of the side of
<v Speaker 1>a fucking volcano. Like beautiful, beautiful thing was I was sprrelating,
<v Speaker 1>so you can tap it in and all this yellow
<v Speaker 1>these yellow spores would come off. But I mean some
<v Speaker 1>of them really, I mean, no, shit, do look like
<v Speaker 1>cedars like a spinning image for like athuia or a
<v Speaker 1>not a true seedar common name sorry, yeah, athuia, or
<v Speaker 1>a juniper or some like capressioid weird conifer. It's so
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's so bizarre.
<v Speaker 2>It really is. Yeah, it's it's it's really it's it's strange.
<v Speaker 2>The level and the degree of parallel evolution that goes
<v Speaker 2>on in these plants with other plants that are completely
<v Speaker 2>unrelated to them is striking. I mean, they're almost sort
<v Speaker 2>of a a chimera like group of plants. And you know,
<v Speaker 2>and the thing too with them is that they they
<v Speaker 2>change so much depending on where they are, like where
<v Speaker 2>they're growing, i e. They they modify their morphology quite
<v Speaker 2>quite significantly depending on what they're doing. So sometimes let's
<v Speaker 2>say they're runners, like on those diapheziastroms, so you're describing
<v Speaker 2>a lot of times they'll be growing on the surface
<v Speaker 2>of the ground, but then they'll just dive underground and
<v Speaker 2>they'll just start branching like hydras, and then they'll just
<v Speaker 2>pop up.
<v Speaker 3>And while they're.
<v Speaker 2>Underground, basically the leaves change shape to become more oppressed,
<v Speaker 2>and it basically is digging through the ground like a worm.
<v Speaker 2>And then it just like spikes out and re has
<v Speaker 2>this new you know, you know, coupressoid sort of growth
<v Speaker 2>Habit just reinvigorate off of this what would have been
<v Speaker 2>a white stem underground. It's just weird.
<v Speaker 1>Thelycopods too, the gometophyte like the haploid gamatofy one one
<v Speaker 1>copy of the genome. There micorrhizal too, and a lot
<v Speaker 1>of them like they need a fungus.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, many of them really do need a fungus. They'll
<v Speaker 2>be some will be micoheterotrophic, so they'll they'll basically parasitize
<v Speaker 2>fungui in a way themselves, kind of like some of
<v Speaker 2>the airicacious fellas that you'll see in some of the forests,
<v Speaker 2>like let's say in Sippy Northwest, a lot of the
<v Speaker 2>irricascious plants are all yeared into trying to hijack basically
<v Speaker 2>nutrients from micro rhyzal communities.
<v Speaker 1>Like ghost pipe or pine ross. So what's up with that?
<v Speaker 1>How does that? How does that? If so a spore
<v Speaker 1>has to land, I mean, so it's got to have
<v Speaker 1>a rich micro hyzal community in the soil already, which
<v Speaker 1>means it's probably growing in a healthy forest or some
<v Speaker 1>sort of setting where the fungus is already abundant or what.
<v Speaker 1>Pretty much it really depends on I think the different
<v Speaker 1>club moss or the fermas species and what its ecological
<v Speaker 1>preferences are. Many of them do grow, I mean, there's
<v Speaker 1>quite a few of them that will grow and just
<v Speaker 1>basically very stable forest understory environments, like we think of
<v Speaker 1>these sort of hardwood forest understory.
<v Speaker 2>Plants in the Northeast, and those those certainly I think
<v Speaker 2>are undergoing that sort of process you describe where the
<v Speaker 2>there's already a really rich microhizal community there and they're
<v Speaker 2>able to tap into that. But there's many of them
<v Speaker 2>that are really colonizers of disturbed environments that basically they
<v Speaker 2>don't face the same sort of competition. Many of these
<v Speaker 2>are very much stress tolerating plants on one way or another,
<v Speaker 2>and it's it's more it's more difficult for me to
<v Speaker 2>envision what exactly is going on for some of those.
<v Speaker 2>There's there's certainly been some work done recently on them.
<v Speaker 2>I have less familiarity with with what's going on in
<v Speaker 2>many of these, these stress tolerators that will take basically
<v Speaker 2>these erosional you know, like landslides and hillslopes, where the
<v Speaker 2>substrate is is very much it's it's poor in organic material.
<v Speaker 2>But these gametophytes might take you know, years and years
<v Speaker 2>and years, maybe over a decade sometimes to develop subterraneanly underground.
<v Speaker 2>And not only that, many of these will have compartments
<v Speaker 2>within their structure. They're basically places where they can farm
<v Speaker 2>micaridza I can colonize and basically live inside of parts
<v Speaker 2>of the tissue where they have like I think like
<v Speaker 2>these it's really weird. I mean, if you ever get
<v Speaker 2>a chance, definitely look up like an old school picture
<v Speaker 2>or like illustration of a gammunified I mean they look
<v Speaker 2>like these demented carots that are white and I don't know, tumorous,
<v Speaker 2>like they're they're bizarre.
<v Speaker 1>And some of them can live for that long and
<v Speaker 1>they communified stage like years or what.
<v Speaker 2>With Zero's sun. Yeah, they're basically almost I mean they're
<v Speaker 2>basically almost parasitic at that rate for the early stage
<v Speaker 2>of their life. And that then eventually when they do
<v Speaker 2>are able to be you know, form archagonia, and some
<v Speaker 2>be fertilized subterranean, you knowly by these motile sperm that
<v Speaker 2>swim through groundwater and then they can send up this
<v Speaker 2>their first sporofy and then start running over the grounds
<v Speaker 2>once they you know, protrude out the surface of the ground.
<v Speaker 2>It's kind of like kind of like an alien life
<v Speaker 2>form in a way.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what is it? But speaking of stressful environments, there
<v Speaker 1>was I remember going to this I forget the name
<v Speaker 1>of it. What was it. Was it Taupo or somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>It was somewhere in New Zealand, and you know, there
<v Speaker 1>were fumaroles everywhere and the ground was smoking, steaming. It
<v Speaker 1>was basically you know the crust is extremely thin right there.
<v Speaker 1>There's this huge body of of lava basically beneath the surface,
<v Speaker 1>and the ground's really toxic in a lot of places
<v Speaker 1>too because of all these gases being emitted. But there
<v Speaker 1>was there were like four different lycopod species at this
<v Speaker 1>site growing up through the trees, some getting six feet tall,
<v Speaker 1>looking like little yellow ropes dangling down. It was so weird, man,
<v Speaker 1>it was so you know, smelled like sulfur. The whole
<v Speaker 1>place smelled like a fart.
<v Speaker 3>You know.
<v Speaker 1>It was really and they were thriving it. They loved it. It
<v Speaker 1>was them and then a couple very acid tolerant members
<v Speaker 1>of Mrtaesi and yeah, I think that I don't even
<v Speaker 1>think there was and some maybe some apacrids, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the airicacious things. Yeah, yeah, but it was just the
<v Speaker 1>often crazy landscape.
<v Speaker 3>Man.
<v Speaker 1>They were thriving. They were like happy as a pig,
<v Speaker 1>and shit.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they love it. I mean, there's there's quite a
<v Speaker 2>number of them that, you know, and and many of
<v Speaker 2>them will tolerate just general low nutrient habitats where there's
<v Speaker 2>just not a lot of nitrogen in the soil. There's
<v Speaker 2>maybe not a lot of phosphorous and they'll just you know,
<v Speaker 2>they'll they'll be fine there as long as they have
<v Speaker 2>persistent moisture and they don't fully dry out. A lot
<v Speaker 2>of those those club mosses and infirmosses can do okay.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, there's definitely some that are like extremophiles on
<v Speaker 2>their own, you know, their own class. I mean, the
<v Speaker 2>ones that grow around humerals. One of the really prominent
<v Speaker 2>ones that you'll see is oftentimes they call them nodding
<v Speaker 2>club moss or it's one of these sort of stag
<v Speaker 2>horning horn like plants, but it'll send up these tree
<v Speaker 2>like shoots off of this arcing, arcing runner or stolen
<v Speaker 2>and they will grow, yeah, as you said, right onto,
<v Speaker 2>and into the edges and the lips of fumoral vents,
<v Speaker 2>and they'll grow in superheated soil. I was, I was
<v Speaker 2>doing fuel work for his National Geographic Project years ago,
<v Speaker 2>and I got to this fumeral vent in Hawaii and
<v Speaker 2>looked down into it and there were what this this
<v Speaker 2>genus of plants pel Inhey, which was formerly called like Podeela,
<v Speaker 2>but it's been split off into its own group, and
<v Speaker 2>they are these like beautiful, beautiful pendant Christmas tree, like, uh,
<v Speaker 2>soorts of shoots coming off of these right, these these
<v Speaker 2>stolens that are king down five six feet hanging into
<v Speaker 2>a fumoral bent that's fully green, not charred green. And
<v Speaker 2>then the entire lawn around them was germinating sporophytes coming
<v Speaker 2>out of imautophytes that were in the superheated clay inside
<v Speaker 2>the lip of the fumeral bent. That just like, what
<v Speaker 2>are you doing? I thought this was cyanobacteria, but nope, nope,
<v Speaker 2>is photosynthetic mutophytes. Do you think it probably needs that?
<v Speaker 1>You probably you think it probably needs those fucked up conditions,
<v Speaker 1>Like do you think you could grow it like in
<v Speaker 1>a lab like and you need that and probably needs
<v Speaker 1>that that extreme condition, that soil temperature.
<v Speaker 2>And it's a really good question. Actually, it turns out
<v Speaker 2>that a lot of these plants, I mean, they'll tolerate
<v Speaker 2>those conditions, but if you just find a lot of
<v Speaker 2>times if you give them pretty mild conditions, so like
<v Speaker 2>those same ones, Yeah, you can just grow them an
<v Speaker 2>augur in a lab under a grow light basically after
<v Speaker 2>you you've played them, and they'll they'll germinate and they'll
<v Speaker 2>grow them. Certain Pacific the auger and beaches.
<v Speaker 3>Fine.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so they're tolerant be fine. Yeah, so they're like
<v Speaker 1>they're tolerant, they're not obligate like serpentine endemics. There are
<v Speaker 1>a lot of like limestone and endemics, et cetera. Yeah, Like, okay,
<v Speaker 1>what is that exact? Before we move on from lycopods,
<v Speaker 1>what's your what's your favorite species? Like a couple of
<v Speaker 1>like just the weirdest, the coolest looking whatever.
<v Speaker 2>I think one of one of them that I can
<v Speaker 2>think of offhand is, uh, there's one that grows in
<v Speaker 2>the paramo of.
<v Speaker 3>Down Ecuador, Peru.
<v Speaker 1>I know it's gonna be. I know it's going to be.
<v Speaker 3>It's weird.
<v Speaker 1>Everything there is cool.
<v Speaker 2>There's so many cool paramo ones. But I would say
<v Speaker 2>that one of my my personal favorites is a there's
<v Speaker 2>a like like a podium that is related to basically
<v Speaker 2>the like punk bottom common, very common, widespread species this
<v Speaker 2>this space lineage down there. This species is called I
<v Speaker 2>think it's like I'm invested, if I'm remembering correctly, do
<v Speaker 2>that are vested? But I think it's based on the
<v Speaker 2>root of the end of lico podium and it is
<v Speaker 2>as its name sort of suggests it is silver, is
<v Speaker 2>fully white, reflective metallic silver. And it looks like.
<v Speaker 1>I'm looking at it, what the fuck? What the what
<v Speaker 1>the fuck?
<v Speaker 2>Is that?
<v Speaker 1>Is that just hair?
<v Speaker 2>It's incredible?
<v Speaker 1>Is that just hair? Is it just tricombes or what
<v Speaker 1>is it?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So it basically is kind of like they have
<v Speaker 2>I think they have reflected basically, the the epidermis of
<v Speaker 2>the plant probably reflects a lot of it, So they
<v Speaker 2>have It must be how the chloroplasts are arranged or
<v Speaker 2>something like that. But they certainly have really prominent hairtips
<v Speaker 2>that overlap, and those hair tips on the tips of
<v Speaker 2>each owl shaped or these long linear leaves will overlap
<v Speaker 2>in this sort of a dense helss.
<v Speaker 1>It looks like it's made out of aluminum. Some of
<v Speaker 1>these look like they're made out of aluminum. Like they're
<v Speaker 1>like aluminum pipe cleaners, These eight inch long aluminum pipe
<v Speaker 1>cleaners just coming out of this this cliff wall.
<v Speaker 2>The soil they're in incredible, and they're stuff. They're super stuff.
<v Speaker 2>They're kind of they're very very reinforced. They've got probably
<v Speaker 2>a lot of silicon in them, so like they're sometimes
<v Speaker 2>they're hard, like with a pair of prunters are hard
<v Speaker 2>to clip because they're they're kind of bambooi in that way,
<v Speaker 2>because they'll take up silicon from the soil water, and
<v Speaker 2>then they'll deposit their tissues in the form of hytaliths,
<v Speaker 2>and so you know, they have this sort of mineral exo.
<v Speaker 1>So what what is the what? So what is the
<v Speaker 1>because equiscetum will do that too. Some of the equis
<v Speaker 1>which is not related to this. And by the way,
<v Speaker 1>if anyone else look this up, like a podium vestidum
<v Speaker 1>v E S t I d U M from the
<v Speaker 1>Peramo the high elevation equatorial latitudes of Ecuador as things
<v Speaker 1>fucking would what is it? Why would some plants do that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, take up silica? Is it just protection or what?
<v Speaker 2>It's a lot of different reasons that silicon can be
<v Speaker 2>can be taken up by plants, and and different plants
<v Speaker 2>use it for different reasons and are and have different
<v Speaker 2>differing abilities to take up silica. So some some ranges
<v Speaker 2>of plants, like you mentioned, the horsetails are a famous example.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, they really use silica for probably for deterring
<v Speaker 2>herbivores because it's kind of like eating sandpaper. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>it grinds down your teeth. It's not it's not really
<v Speaker 2>a great experience. Yeah, but the other you know, there's
<v Speaker 2>other reasons too. I mean, silica can also help deter
<v Speaker 2>pathogens too. It can be can really help strengthen and
<v Speaker 2>reinforce the cells a little bit if it's there, and
<v Speaker 2>so you'll have defensive you'll have structural use of silica,
<v Speaker 2>and it'll have benefits against warding off disease sometimes like
<v Speaker 2>bumble attack, depending on where they're storing silicon in their
<v Speaker 2>in their cells.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, you probably out there probably need a whole other
<v Speaker 1>suite of enzymes to break down silica versus just regular carbon,
<v Speaker 1>right right.
<v Speaker 2>So it's so it's interesting because sometimes in large scale horticulture,
<v Speaker 2>crops will be dosed with with silicon dissolve basically silica,
<v Speaker 2>which is really difficult because it binds so easily with
<v Speaker 2>other sorts of elements and and so you have to
<v Speaker 2>you're going to dose a plant with silicon in a pot,
<v Speaker 2>which you can do for some plants. That actually is
<v Speaker 2>a benefit of other plants. Well, don't try it on
<v Speaker 2>like sphagn of moss. That that was a disaster. You
<v Speaker 2>try that other sorts of plants, they'll actually really, they'll
<v Speaker 2>they'll perk up and they'll create a much stronger sort
<v Speaker 2>of structure, so they'll they'll basically strengthen up and stiffen up.
<v Speaker 2>And that sometimes is used when when you're getting ready
<v Speaker 2>to go into winter. For some crops and greenhouses. Silicon
<v Speaker 2>can sometimes have benefits.
<v Speaker 1>But just keep it away from the spagnum. Don't give
<v Speaker 1>don't get silicon spagnum, right the public service announcement.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, yes, keep it away from your bogs, your your
<v Speaker 2>local bog. Keep your silicon away from there. Keep it
<v Speaker 2>to yourself.
<v Speaker 1>This So what do you think this? What was the
<v Speaker 1>adaptive benefit in this species, like a podium bestetum of of.
<v Speaker 2>This silver, well in the silver and the silver itself
<v Speaker 2>is is so is independent of it of silica being
<v Speaker 2>taken up, but that silver reflectance, I mean, the main
<v Speaker 2>thought would be that whether it's adaptive or what we
<v Speaker 2>call xaptive, where something evolved for a reason long long
<v Speaker 2>ago that may not be a parent today anymore, but
<v Speaker 2>has become co opted for something today. Probably the best
<v Speaker 2>reason I can think of would be UV reflectants on
<v Speaker 2>these guys. Yeah right, so very high elevation, yeah, sunlit
<v Speaker 2>sort of as you saw disturbed cliff faces, you know,
<v Speaker 2>embankments of trails and mountain sides.
<v Speaker 1>So is that silver? Is that like a scale or
<v Speaker 1>is it the like a trichome or how what is
<v Speaker 1>it exactly? I can't really see from the photos I'm
<v Speaker 1>looking at.
<v Speaker 2>I should check really quick. I actually grow it, let
<v Speaker 2>me find it. I've got a little bit of this going.
<v Speaker 2>If I were to look at it, I remember correctly.
<v Speaker 1>God, it looks so remarkable now.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So most of what's going on is on the plant.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's basically extensions to the margin of the leaf.
<v Speaker 2>So basically the leaf margin extends out almost like a wing,
<v Speaker 2>and is just this sort of paper like translucent sort
<v Speaker 2>of extension.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I was going to say, like a papery wing.
<v Speaker 1>Or you're looking at like a physical specimen right now?
<v Speaker 2>Correct? Yeah, looking at it.
<v Speaker 1>You can't get much better than that. That's perfect.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, I was just Yeah, it's hard for me
<v Speaker 2>to remember, and on the pictures it's hard to sort
<v Speaker 2>of see what's going on because it's it's such a
<v Speaker 2>fine minute detail.
<v Speaker 1>Are you at your house or at the university now
<v Speaker 1>or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I'm not my house.
<v Speaker 1>I bet you've got a lot of nice stuff. Man,
<v Speaker 1>Holy shit, it's like going to visit Martin Grantham, and
<v Speaker 1>it's always fun going to the house. He's got something
<v Speaker 1>new going on, some other weird, rare ass species of
<v Speaker 1>plant from god knows where.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, yeah, Martin's place is a treat and I've.
<v Speaker 3>Not gotten to see.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the stuff he's gotten northern California, but but down
<v Speaker 2>at least, visiting where he's at over in the Bay
<v Speaker 2>is amazing.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. God, this thing is, man, this is got that habitat.
<v Speaker 1>I bet there's so much other cool shit grown around
<v Speaker 1>it too. There it is apparently so this is really
<v Speaker 1>wet too, right, really wet but high.
<v Speaker 2>Very wet, but very well. And it kind of depends too.
<v Speaker 2>Sometimes you'll you'll find these sorts of plants that's sort
<v Speaker 2>of the margin or the eco tone of where you
<v Speaker 2>get dry, like really dry, so there'll be a lot
<v Speaker 2>of fog up there. But sometimes they'll be right near,
<v Speaker 2>right at the edge of where you're getting into almost
<v Speaker 2>like this highland desert or grassland.
<v Speaker 1>It look like thick forest. Here it looks like chaperone,
<v Speaker 1>kind of like a low growing plant community.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, exactly. So the at least people I've talked to
<v Speaker 2>and colleagues who have been doing fieldwork down there, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and some of the people I grow them for basically
<v Speaker 2>are like, yeah, this was this was found and originally
<v Speaker 2>collected somewhere where there was actually pretty paradoxically really dry,
<v Speaker 2>but it was you know, cold, and they often had clouds,
<v Speaker 2>and it is very humid, probably cold and humid, which
<v Speaker 2>is a fun combo. And yet these plants can just
<v Speaker 2>hang on if it's just if they're not fully desiccated,
<v Speaker 2>their roots are doing a k many times once they're acclimatized.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, they're they're pretty tough, but it's just they
<v Speaker 2>don't they often sort of need a lot of consistency
<v Speaker 2>in their habitat environmentally.
<v Speaker 1>So okay, so this is so this is uh, we
<v Speaker 1>got this this lycopod. What is one more species in
<v Speaker 1>this group before we move on from it? You want
<v Speaker 1>to recommend?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, there's I'm trying to think there's there's certainly
<v Speaker 2>yeah in that group. I mean another one that's that's
<v Speaker 2>really amazing, that grows really huge, uh that I'm working
<v Speaker 2>with currently is uh a flag mary or as Dalhousianus,
<v Speaker 2>which is the possibly one of the most endangered of
<v Speaker 2>those sort of lycopods. It's it's one of it's the
<v Speaker 2>largest at least epiphytic Thupersia type relative, and it's gigantic.
<v Speaker 2>It's yeah, it's these are amazing plants.
<v Speaker 1>Where is this native?
<v Speaker 2>These These range from Australia up through Fiji into parts
<v Speaker 2>of uh basically islands in Southeast Asia, So it's it's
<v Speaker 2>kind of it has a wide distribution going up into
<v Speaker 2>Malaysia to down through be Guinea, Australia, Fiji, but it
<v Speaker 2>is really uncommon across its entire range.
<v Speaker 1>Dell d A l h o U s i e
<v Speaker 1>A n u s if anybody wants to look it up.
<v Speaker 1>Fled mary ers p h l e g m A
<v Speaker 1>r i U r u S. Yeah. That man, it's
<v Speaker 1>like again it's like the silvery, glaucous blue, but it's
<v Speaker 1>like these pendent ropes of giant pipe cleaners dangling down
<v Speaker 1>six feet from a tree canopy.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's there's some monster ones out there. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>I've heard rumors of them being able to get tassels
<v Speaker 2>that will grow like twenty feet long or something like that.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>And there you know, they'll be the stem itself is
<v Speaker 2>about you know, maybe a centimeter in diameter, which when
<v Speaker 2>you have these three almost four centimeter long leaves coming off,
<v Speaker 2>it makes it. It's it's a very robust plant. They're
<v Speaker 2>basically like Aracaria are kana like branches in width in
<v Speaker 2>that way. But it's as you said, striking silver blue.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I have I have definitely a soft spot
<v Speaker 2>for a lot of like glaucous plants. I collect mansonitos
<v Speaker 2>and things like that at home.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, just.
<v Speaker 2>They're great. It's a beautiful. Yeah, it's really a nice
<v Speaker 2>but it's also such a cool and neat way to
<v Speaker 2>see how how plants will defend themselves from sun and heat,
<v Speaker 2>you know, which, which figures into some of the research
<v Speaker 2>of work done as well. But yeah, the Housianus is
<v Speaker 2>an amazing plant. It's basically, I believe, diverges from the
<v Speaker 2>other flag mariurus like it's its own group and it's
<v Speaker 2>the last surviving member I think of it's it's lineage.
<v Speaker 2>But it is also greatly imperiled. So they're on the brink.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, they're pretty much, I feel like, on the
<v Speaker 2>brink of extinction in a way because they don't they
<v Speaker 2>don't grow fast and they're extremely difficult to cultivate. So
<v Speaker 2>since there's such a gigantic and beautiful plant, they have
<v Speaker 2>been prized by plant collectors and so they get ripped
<v Speaker 2>out of the wild and usually die when people try
<v Speaker 2>and grow them. So but once you've you've taken it
<v Speaker 2>out of the tree, I mean again, those spores need
<v Speaker 2>to germinate. If it does spread spore, it will need
<v Speaker 2>to land somewhere that's ideal, have the right sort of
<v Speaker 2>micrhysals ambiance, and it'll take ages to get through the
<v Speaker 2>gametophyte stage to generate a parent plant.
<v Speaker 1>So the gomatify of these is really long. It's not
<v Speaker 1>you know, for like anyone listening, doesn't you know, like
<v Speaker 1>your ferns, Well, everything's got to commutify it. But like
<v Speaker 1>on a fern gomatify it looks like a little piece
<v Speaker 1>of lettuce, maybe a centimeter maybe less, and it's not
<v Speaker 1>you know, doesn't last that long before it turns into
<v Speaker 1>a SPORTI fight. But for some of these lycopods, the
<v Speaker 1>gamto fyt that haploid single copy of the genome stage
<v Speaker 1>can last for years, just dependent on micae riise. Not
<v Speaker 1>even photosynthesizing just basically parasitizing fung it and the fact
<v Speaker 1>that they need Michael rise too. I mean that already
<v Speaker 1>should tell you it's gonna need like a healthy plant community.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's not. It's not like a disturbance species something
<v Speaker 1>like this. You know, it's needs intact forests, right, I
<v Speaker 1>mean this is queen I see Queensland through New Guinea
<v Speaker 1>probably up into yeah, so basically Australasia. So what I
<v Speaker 1>mean that that's wild too? So is there Michael riise Like,
<v Speaker 1>it's an epiphyte on the is there Michael riiseo rizle
<v Speaker 1>fungus on some of the plants that it's growing on,
<v Speaker 1>like the tree bark that it's growing on.
<v Speaker 2>What I think? So, so a lot of these will
<v Speaker 2>basically live in what are termed almost like epiphytic like
<v Speaker 2>peat deposits. So they're basically like peat islands up in
<v Speaker 2>the sky.
<v Speaker 3>It is a way to think of it.
<v Speaker 2>And they sort of have I mean that whole group
<v Speaker 2>of these, I mean, all these lycophytes, they came from
<v Speaker 2>the ground at some point or another. They were all
<v Speaker 2>terrestrial at one point or another, and then these epiphytes
<v Speaker 2>diverged from those and were able to find something that
<v Speaker 2>was analogous to the ground, but up up high where
<v Speaker 2>they could beat the competition for light by just becoming
<v Speaker 2>epiphytic and pendent, because again they're slow growing and they're
<v Speaker 2>poor competitors. I mean, for most of the lycophytes tend
<v Speaker 2>to be very poor competitors if there's anything else that
<v Speaker 2>can get an edge or get growing fast. There are exceptions,
<v Speaker 2>though there are some invasive Silaginella is like South African
<v Speaker 2>slagno across Siana, which is often soil the garden centers
<v Speaker 2>is a terrible weed in New Zealand and a number
<v Speaker 2>of other places.
<v Speaker 1>We're going to talk about the seleage, but we're gonna
<v Speaker 1>with the whole rest of the podcasts. I want to
<v Speaker 1>talk about Silegia now and about some of the cool
<v Speaker 1>work you've done with these, especially as it relates to
<v Speaker 1>major extinction events of the past. But just before we
<v Speaker 1>do that, though this man, this the the god, the
<v Speaker 1>habitat that something like this grows in this flag, Mary
<v Speaker 1>ears del housenis like I would just love to I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I imagine it's just like a really hot, humid but
<v Speaker 1>can also dry out a little bit. Forests probably just
<v Speaker 1>really hot. I mean this, this thick white wax on
<v Speaker 1>these lycophyls has got to be it's an adaptation to
<v Speaker 1>heat and sun or what.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I think so. For so, I haven't myself been
<v Speaker 2>into the field with them, but at least people have
<v Speaker 2>talked to have seen them. Sometimes they'll be they'll be
<v Speaker 2>at elev too a little bit, so like in Fiji.
<v Speaker 2>They'll grow apparently at mid elevation or up a little bit,
<v Speaker 2>but up in high in tree canopies, so they might
<v Speaker 2>be dealing with a little bit higher elevation and sometimes
<v Speaker 2>not certainly not all of them, I mean, like I
<v Speaker 2>don't I don't think some of the ones like in Queensland.
<v Speaker 2>So person to talk to about this species who really
<v Speaker 2>has done a ton of work on them is Ashley
<v Speaker 2>Field Australia, and he's really rediscovered basically populations that were
<v Speaker 2>thought to be extinct in Australia.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah right, they're copyright ar Field. That the photo I'm
<v Speaker 1>looking at. God, what a remarkable fucking plant though, Jesus.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, oh man, they're They're incredible. And I ended up
<v Speaker 2>with a bunch of them this summer which was crazy.
<v Speaker 2>I wasn't fully ready to start growing these things, but
<v Speaker 2>I was like, well, I don't have a greenhouse for them.
<v Speaker 2>I guess I'm going to have to figure out how
<v Speaker 2>to grow them under artificial light. And it's been a
<v Speaker 2>bit of a devil, but I mean I haven't lost
<v Speaker 2>them so far, but I'm getting a bunch of new
<v Speaker 2>pups coming out from the bases of them, and yeah,
<v Speaker 2>we'll see knock on wood. I mean, they seem to
<v Speaker 2>be healthy and rooting and growing and you know, trying
<v Speaker 2>to figure out how to grow them with limited sort
<v Speaker 2>of space. But yeah, there's very few people in the
<v Speaker 2>world growing them. I mean, Ashley is certainly one of them.
<v Speaker 2>But they're basically in the US. There was one nursery
<v Speaker 2>growing them for years, and that nursery shut down this
<v Speaker 2>year and so there was a deluge of the specimens
<v Speaker 2>that a person have propagated, and so you know, they
<v Speaker 2>basically were out on the market very briefly, and so
<v Speaker 2>I ended up adopting a bunch from the nursery owner
<v Speaker 2>and we're.
<v Speaker 3>Hopefully, hopefully some of them will be propagated.
<v Speaker 2>A bunch of them made it to Thailand, thankfully, so
<v Speaker 2>there's a hope that in Thailand they'll be able to
<v Speaker 2>be mass cultured and that can alleviate a lot of
<v Speaker 2>the strain on wild populations because if you make it
<v Speaker 2>easier to at least work with an horticulture, it shouldn't
<v Speaker 2>be as much of a problem. Do you know what
<v Speaker 2>would be approaching though.
<v Speaker 1>With these like with like something like this one of
<v Speaker 1>these weird lycopods, since they're homospores, they're basically putting out
<v Speaker 1>bisexual spores, right, spores that it can either produce, uh
<v Speaker 1>you know, sperm in the anthidia or the egg and arcagonia?
<v Speaker 1>Is it if you just have one genetic individual, well,
<v Speaker 1>can you get I mean decent genetic diversity from that?
<v Speaker 1>Like are they self fertile? Can you propagate theoretically? I
<v Speaker 1>know this is really hard, this one this species really hard.
<v Speaker 1>But can you theoretically get new phenotypes, like new genetic
<v Speaker 1>individuals from one or do you need two?
<v Speaker 2>In theory you could get it from one? Yeah, typically
<v Speaker 2>with some of these homosporous lycophytes, you could. You could
<v Speaker 2>take us a yield of spores from one one spore
<v Speaker 2>cone or at least uh borangia and in one of
<v Speaker 2>those Strobel eye and you can get you can get
<v Speaker 2>a lot of gametophytes if if you're doing it right,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, and that's sort of the big key is
<v Speaker 2>a lot of these these flake mariuris and these suprasioids
<v Speaker 2>are just a devil to germinate, and because you need
<v Speaker 2>the michael a lot of times you do, but you
<v Speaker 2>can still do it on augur apparently depending on the type.
<v Speaker 2>But it's it's such a slow process and it also
<v Speaker 2>you get I mean, if I remember correctly his studies
<v Speaker 2>where people were trying to germinate many of these these
<v Speaker 2>homosporous likewides, you get varying success. So there's very low
<v Speaker 2>germination rates on some of these, like epiphytic ones. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>it can be really difficult in the lab. Do you
<v Speaker 2>get the epithetic ones to behave There was one person
<v Speaker 2>by the name of Dean Whittier who really mastered this,
<v Speaker 2>and he was he was germanating paramou pichophytes in his lab.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, he was just it was amazing and agar
<v Speaker 2>I mean, yeah, I think a lot of it is agur,
<v Speaker 2>but like you know, some of it took years, uh yours,
<v Speaker 2>and he would just record the ratio of how many
<v Speaker 2>of the spores he he sewed with Germany, and he
<v Speaker 2>gave really low germination rates sometimes on these things.
<v Speaker 1>So it's just so fucking weird, man. I mean that
<v Speaker 1>for a ammetophyte, for a plant to for a photosynthetic plant,
<v Speaker 1>or a plant that you know eventually produces CHLOROPHYLLM. Cammi photosynthetic,
<v Speaker 1>for it to just live in at commutafyte stage not
<v Speaker 1>photosynthesizing for like five years, that's talking last. That's that's
<v Speaker 1>like alien shit, what the fuck you know?
<v Speaker 2>He is? Yeah, it's almost And again those sorts of
<v Speaker 2>like they basically have some of them can basically have
<v Speaker 2>these compartments where it's like a fungal factory where they
<v Speaker 2>basically are inviting the infection of a microrhysal fungus and
<v Speaker 2>then they'll basically give them space to grow within their tissues.
<v Speaker 2>So it's it's almost kind of like some of the
<v Speaker 2>plants in rhiny Chirt where you're back in Scotland and
<v Speaker 2>billions of years, like hundreds of millions of years ago
<v Speaker 2>in the Devonian, where you had hot spring plants, early
<v Speaker 2>land plants that were colonized by fungi and had basically
<v Speaker 2>layers of fungal like cultures in their tissues before they
<v Speaker 2>had true roots.
<v Speaker 1>I forgot. You're a palaeobotanist too, and you know all
<v Speaker 1>this weird shit that was, you know, extent four hundred
<v Speaker 1>million years ago, fucking weird. Yeah, oh my god, it's
<v Speaker 1>my goodness. Might be a long podcast. Jeff buckle in. Okay, Boddy,
<v Speaker 1>it's all right, okay, that's all right. Well, yeah, that
<v Speaker 1>that's I mean, god, damn, like could tell everybody about
<v Speaker 1>the riny shirt. First off, let's just just fuck it.
<v Speaker 1>It's just going there, tell everybody about the riiny shirt.
<v Speaker 2>What is it? Sure? So the rhine shirt is basically
<v Speaker 2>this fossil deposit that we call Lagerstaton, which is this
<v Speaker 2>this basically fossil assemblage that's a moment locked in time
<v Speaker 2>that's so exceptionally preserved that we basically have a window
<v Speaker 2>into this this ecosystem like exactly like a three D photo.
<v Speaker 2>This is a this was a hot spring system back
<v Speaker 2>in the early Devonian period, and it basically was capturing
<v Speaker 2>through silica, basically preserving everything in three dimensional cellular level
<v Speaker 2>detail throughout this hot spring community. And we're we're talking
<v Speaker 2>about basically these these wetlands that surrounded hot springs that
<v Speaker 2>were periodically inundated by the hot spring like hot waters,
<v Speaker 2>and silica deposited onto the surface of every little plant
<v Speaker 2>and every little animal that get hit with this superheated
<v Speaker 2>silica solution would become basically entombed in silicon.
<v Speaker 1>So what time period was this? This is four hundred
<v Speaker 1>million years ago for thirty.
<v Speaker 2>Or yeah, yeah, so this is like early Devonian period,
<v Speaker 2>So this was the age of fishes.
<v Speaker 1>This is like soon after land plants above relatively speak, yes, right.
<v Speaker 2>Exactly, relatively speaking, this is basically after the first waves
<v Speaker 2>of basically the diversification of land plants had happened. So
<v Speaker 2>we're we're basically looking at these ecosystems where some of
<v Speaker 2>the first the early early what we call vascular or plants,
<v Speaker 2>which is a terrible term because everyone I knows days
<v Speaker 2>moss and liverworts is like they also have water in
<v Speaker 2>nutrient conducting tissues. But the plants that we call tracheophytes
<v Speaker 2>or have these tracheods, these specialized water conducting cells, they
<v Speaker 2>start diverging right this, you know, before this and this
<v Speaker 2>is really our best look into an early ecosystem of
<v Speaker 2>these seed free plants that didn't have roots yet or leaves,
<v Speaker 2>many of them.
<v Speaker 1>Just how different did things look yet? There weren't any
<v Speaker 1>trees yet so far as we know, right, like there
<v Speaker 1>was none of this stuff was very large.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, so this was before shade was invented on land,
<v Speaker 2>so basically really really sun blasted environments. I mean, it
<v Speaker 2>would have been like another planet, and you would have
<v Speaker 2>had substrates that really, for the most part, the organics
<v Speaker 2>weren't built up very solidly yet in the substrates. So
<v Speaker 2>the birth of dirt is sort of a way of
<v Speaker 2>putting it. Sort of was happening at this time in
<v Speaker 2>the first peat deposits were being laid down, and so
<v Speaker 2>a lot of these there was sort of this clone
<v Speaker 2>world where you had this patchwork quilt. If you looked
<v Speaker 2>across these sort of lunar landscapes of basically rock stone
<v Speaker 2>and clay, where you'd have hot green like acid green
<v Speaker 2>sorts of fields of these tuning fork branching dichopotomously branch
<v Speaker 2>a whisk fern like plants among them rhineophytes, a gleophytons.
<v Speaker 2>Another famous one.
<v Speaker 1>What was the atmosphere like back then, like the atmosphere
<v Speaker 1>and the temperature.
<v Speaker 2>Really good question. So up until recently we've thought that okay,
<v Speaker 2>the atmosphere at this time must have had a super
<v Speaker 2>high CO two level, and that the basically the atmosphere
<v Speaker 2>CO two levels would have been really high, and you
<v Speaker 2>would have had really high temperatures, so really hot, steamy,
<v Speaker 2>you know, very very hot, muggy, humid environment from basically
<v Speaker 2>the poles to the equator. So we had a lot
<v Speaker 2>less diversity and the latitudinal gradient of climates back then.
<v Speaker 2>But more recent work that was done in Europe by
<v Speaker 2>a team of researchers looking at basically the stomata on
<v Speaker 2>lycophytes from this time and comparing them across the world
<v Speaker 2>and then looking relative to modern living flag Marierus growing
<v Speaker 2>in greenhouses. They're basically able to calibrate and figure out
<v Speaker 2>what the store model densies on lycophytes and response to
<v Speaker 2>these CO two levels might have been, and it suggests
<v Speaker 2>that the world was actually a lot colder than we
<v Speaker 2>may have initially thought. So there's thought that there were
<v Speaker 2>there might have been glaciated area US actually at this time,
<v Speaker 2>and it may have been a lot more like today
<v Speaker 2>in some ways, certainly probably a lot hotter, but possibly
<v Speaker 2>not quite as steambathy tropical as we initially.
<v Speaker 1>Thought, not as much oxygen probably right for more oxygen
<v Speaker 1>or what.
<v Speaker 2>Back then, I guess relative it probably would have been
<v Speaker 2>maybe less proportion relative to CO two, So the CO
<v Speaker 2>two levels should have been a lot higher, I would
<v Speaker 2>think back then than relative today, but not so astronomically
<v Speaker 2>high that they wouldn't permit glaciation in the mountains at
<v Speaker 2>that time. And it's interesting, I mean that sort of
<v Speaker 2>study that came out. I did a reconstruction for to
<v Speaker 2>accompany the study of basically like trying to reimagine what
<v Speaker 2>these landscapes looked like. And you know, it was basically
<v Speaker 2>now like it's basically the same thing, but with with
<v Speaker 2>glaciated you know, mountains or snow capped mountains too, which
<v Speaker 2>I think is a nice touch, you know, But a
<v Speaker 2>lot of what you would see in a place like
<v Speaker 2>Ranny Churt would be very much just fields of these
<v Speaker 2>plants growing in alongside waterways and watercourses and wetlands, how
<v Speaker 2>big tall, like just mats of really small yeah, maybe
<v Speaker 2>ten inches tall for some of the really large ones.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of them are only a few centimeters tall,
<v Speaker 2>like you might have had things like Cooksonia that were
<v Speaker 2>you know, even earlier and are a little more enigmatic
<v Speaker 2>and a little bit more of a waste spin of
<v Speaker 2>a plant group where they'd be you know, they'd be
<v Speaker 2>like a really large moss almost, but they'd be tiny
<v Speaker 2>little tuning forks with you know, spore bearing you know,
<v Speaker 2>basically sporangia on them, depending on whether they were you know,
<v Speaker 2>actually what we consider to be true tracheophytes and somewhere
<v Speaker 2>what we called paratracheapytes, where they we don't really know
<v Speaker 2>exactly what they were. They might have been me to
<v Speaker 2>fight dominant, and yet we've been interpreting them as sporopytes
<v Speaker 2>for a long time. So there's there's a lot of
<v Speaker 2>really topsy turvy things going on evolutionarily for lack of
<v Speaker 2>a I mean, it's a really scientific way of putting it,
<v Speaker 2>I guess.
<v Speaker 1>But it's like I mean, but it's it's such a
<v Speaker 1>bizarre I mean, it's like nothing that we can imagine today.
<v Speaker 2>You know, it's so hard to make make what's you know,
<v Speaker 2>make make sense of what's going on. Yet they had
<v Speaker 2>that they had only evolved in in lycophytes, so the
<v Speaker 2>forerunner of our modern club mosses we have, we have
<v Speaker 2>the first leaves, however they're not by the time of
<v Speaker 2>rhiny chert leaves had already evolved. I think in there's
<v Speaker 2>a plant called Baragwanathia, which was the earliest mega basically
<v Speaker 2>like a fight that enters the fossil record, and it
<v Speaker 2>may have been something that was on its way to
<v Speaker 2>maybe it was. It was probably a sister group or
<v Speaker 2>an outgroup to what you looked at the family tree
<v Speaker 2>of the modern like fights, it probably is branching off
<v Speaker 2>of them, but it looks darn like some of these
<v Speaker 2>modern big club mosses today. And Bragwanathia was the size
<v Speaker 2>of like a timber bamboo. It was monstrous and I
<v Speaker 2>don't know, you have to like they were big, like
<v Speaker 2>the stem was maybe two three centimeters in diameter, and
<v Speaker 2>then the leaves would be up to you know, like
<v Speaker 2>basically four centimeters like two inches long. At least it's
<v Speaker 2>plain off there. So like the thickness of this thing was,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's like a mid sized bamboo. And we
<v Speaker 2>don't really know exactly what its habit was. We think
<v Speaker 2>it was basically this prostrate meaning running along the ground
<v Speaker 2>sort of plant. But you know, it's it's a little
<v Speaker 2>hard to make out exactly what's going on because our
<v Speaker 2>fossils are always fragmentary.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but it still looked like a green pipe cleaner,
<v Speaker 1>basically just.
<v Speaker 2>A exactly a really really girsy pipe cleaner. But it's
<v Speaker 2>coming on the scene. It was discovered in Australia and
<v Speaker 2>described from the Silarian the late Solarnian period. This full sized,
<v Speaker 2>full fledge leafed potentially rooted like a fight, so involved
<v Speaker 2>roots and beads infinitely of all other plants, and yet
<v Speaker 2>its date seemed to not line up for a lot
<v Speaker 2>of paleobotanists. I mean, there were a lot of people
<v Speaker 2>I think in the Northern Hemisphere were just like, uh
<v Speaker 2>or the Australian's right on this date for this thing.
<v Speaker 2>And as soon as like, yeah this is this is
<v Speaker 2>Blade's Learnian. And so there's been a massive back and
<v Speaker 2>forth and I think the debate is raged too, even
<v Speaker 2>recently about what is the date of these bloody plants.
<v Speaker 1>They pushed have they pushed back the evolution of terrestrial plants?
<v Speaker 1>I know it used to be like four fifty million
<v Speaker 1>years and one of like if I teach the stuff,
<v Speaker 1>that's something I always tell people. I'm like, you got
<v Speaker 1>to have that landmark evolution address real plants four fifty
<v Speaker 1>million years, you know, evolution of just right, just like
<v Speaker 1>what you do with you know, evolutionary carreotic life, great
<v Speaker 1>oxygenation event, et cetera. What is it at now? Is
<v Speaker 1>it four fifty or did it get pushed back to
<v Speaker 1>five hundred or what?
<v Speaker 2>I think there's been a I think there have been
<v Speaker 2>attempts to push it back to about five hundred. There
<v Speaker 2>is more work that's pushing it back I think further.
<v Speaker 2>I might I know some pay bonders. You are currently
<v Speaker 2>working on a work to push back the date and
<v Speaker 2>may have some new evidence. So yeah, there's certainly it'll
<v Speaker 2>be coming up and I guess in the plant news
<v Speaker 2>at some point in the near future dates. But in general,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, one of the principles with the fossil record
<v Speaker 2>is in general is that we obviously have sort of
<v Speaker 2>a fragmented view of the world, and what tends to
<v Speaker 2>happen most often in the case of discoveries in Peey
<v Speaker 2>Bonny is that you usually will find precocious occurrences of
<v Speaker 2>things in terms of time going back in time. So
<v Speaker 2>if there's anything that I'm usually not surprised by, it's like, oh,
<v Speaker 2>we found an earlier version of this, Like Okay, I
<v Speaker 2>expected that, Yeah, because it's we're only we're only seeing
<v Speaker 2>you know, like you have such a low chance of
<v Speaker 2>being fossilized as an organ of a plant that falls
<v Speaker 2>in just the right environment that you have to figure
<v Speaker 2>that for every one little fragment of a plant that
<v Speaker 2>you see, there must be a heck of a lot
<v Speaker 2>of them out there that never got into the fossil record. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>That drives me nuts. I'm thinking about it.
<v Speaker 2>Does. It's the sort of thing that keeps me up
<v Speaker 2>at night because I'm just like, well, what have we met?
<v Speaker 2>What extent?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, you're just like, well what the fuck? Like you're
<v Speaker 1>seeing one percent of everything that was there. You're like, God,
<v Speaker 1>what what was it?
<v Speaker 2>Like?
<v Speaker 1>I just want to know what it was like back then?
<v Speaker 1>I want to know what was going on. Yeah, there's
<v Speaker 1>just so much that will never know, you know, Like
<v Speaker 1>I deal with that all the time with desert stuff,
<v Speaker 1>Like a lot of desertsn't produce good fossils. It's just
<v Speaker 1>not the right environment for it.
<v Speaker 2>And these are areas where innovation is key. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>deserts are deserts, uplands are also there, arid lands, those
<v Speaker 2>are key places where you rarely get basically preservation, and
<v Speaker 2>I have to I mean, I could be butchering this
<v Speaker 2>spin a little while since I've been looking back at
<v Speaker 2>Rennie shirt type stuff, but my impression was RENI shirt's
<v Speaker 2>a little bit higher elevation too, is the thought it
<v Speaker 2>represents an ecosystem wasn't like on the coast. It might
<v Speaker 2>have been more at upper elevation than typical, which was
<v Speaker 2>also a really significant part I think of why this
<v Speaker 2>this fossil sewich was so special for understanding the evolution
<v Speaker 2>of plant life at that time. We just don't get
<v Speaker 2>those sorts of what they call the hinterland sorts of
<v Speaker 2>preservation as often and especially Yeah, I was.
<v Speaker 1>Going to say it might have been too. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>a hot spring, you know, it's producing this delicious shirt
<v Speaker 1>material to it probably wasn't you know, it was probably
<v Speaker 1>a kind of an extreme environment. Like you know, we're
<v Speaker 1>not like what was the just regular old environment during
<v Speaker 1>the Devonian? You know, what did it look like back then?
<v Speaker 1>Because we're seeing this specialized environment that was great for
<v Speaker 1>making fossils. It's all this you know, silica rich waters
<v Speaker 1>being pumped out. But what is you know what it
<v Speaker 1>just like the normal you know, something that wasn't an
<v Speaker 1>extremeophile environment. What did that look like back then? You know,
<v Speaker 1>did it get fossilized or has it been you know,
<v Speaker 1>destroyed since then or what you know?
<v Speaker 2>And this is absolutely the sorts of questions that definitely
<v Speaker 2>have have also you know, have have trouble with a
<v Speaker 2>lot of pay bonus about this kind of system. Is
<v Speaker 2>that are we seeing exactly the ro we are? We
<v Speaker 2>are clearly seeing the effects of an ecosystem that has
<v Speaker 2>is dominated by extremophiles. And extreme files are not the
<v Speaker 2>norm usually across much of the planet. They're I mean,
<v Speaker 2>extreme files are usually not your your typical opportunistic weedy plants.
<v Speaker 2>They often they often have the ability to tolerate these
<v Speaker 2>sorts of traits or these these environmental these environmental traits,
<v Speaker 2>but they're they're not usually because they're like, yeah, I
<v Speaker 2>can grow so much faster and everything else, and I'm
<v Speaker 2>I'm able to reproduce so quickly.
<v Speaker 3>If you do, like I have to be able to
<v Speaker 3>hunker down.
<v Speaker 2>And live basically at the equivalent of like a hydrothermal vent.
<v Speaker 2>Like life might be really slow for me because I
<v Speaker 2>can't access everything because you know, things aren't liberated or
<v Speaker 2>or they're liberated in excess, like I can't I can't
<v Speaker 2>take up all the toxins and all the poisonous metals
<v Speaker 2>heavy metal that are in the soil. You know, like
<v Speaker 2>I have to limit what I uptake.
<v Speaker 1>Right.
<v Speaker 2>It's super hot right now, and so celluar processes are
<v Speaker 2>like going haywire. They're really fast, and it's like no, no, no,
<v Speaker 2>I need to you limit my inflow. Right, So it's
<v Speaker 2>a very different strategy. But yeah, Rinie Shirt might not.
<v Speaker 2>It's not necessarily reflective of everywhere on the planet of
<v Speaker 2>course at that time. And we do get a really
<v Speaker 2>wonderful glimpse too with Rhinny Shirt into the evolution of
<v Speaker 2>a lot of terrestrial arthropods, which is really neat.
<v Speaker 1>That's pretty cool. What they look like, I mean, what
<v Speaker 1>a little flee like it's pill bugs or fleas or
<v Speaker 1>like what.
<v Speaker 2>Was Yeah, you have things that kind of look like
<v Speaker 2>that sort of ilk. So you have the first actually
<v Speaker 2>the first reproductive organs of an animal are captured in
<v Speaker 2>the rhiny shirt in three dimensional detail, and that was
<v Speaker 2>of a harvestman a little basically what people will call
<v Speaker 2>daddy long legs. They're not the spiders, but they're part
<v Speaker 2>of the group called opilionaires. They're basically they looked exactly
<v Speaker 2>the same. Cool And there are some fossil deposits I
<v Speaker 2>don't think they might not be in rhiney chirt, or
<v Speaker 2>maybe they are where the first predator I think that
<v Speaker 2>we have evidence of in the fossil record, or house centipedes,
<v Speaker 2>and they look virtually the same as back in the
<v Speaker 2>Solarium's so.
<v Speaker 1>Wild, man, Why does shit just not change? It's so weird, Like,
<v Speaker 1>why does some things just not change? There's no reason to,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's crazy. Other stuff. Other stuff radiates and
<v Speaker 1>diversifies and you get all these weird forms evolving and
<v Speaker 1>then other stuff. He's like, no, I'm just done good
<v Speaker 1>and I'll just sit like this for five hundred million years,
<v Speaker 1>you know exactly, Witch, Well, my linea is just fine
<v Speaker 1>like this. It's so bizarre, and it's.
<v Speaker 2>It's also crazy with things like that, like the house centipede.
<v Speaker 2>It's kind of in terms of animal like, it's not
<v Speaker 2>the sort of thing I would expect to see super
<v Speaker 2>early on, and like even for the evolution of centipedes
<v Speaker 2>for instance, like house centipedes, they've got compound eyes, they've
<v Speaker 2>got fantastic vision, they got like pragmantis like vision, and
<v Speaker 2>they're they have the most like advanced like respiratory system
<v Speaker 2>of any terrestrial arthropod. They they're far more efficient at
<v Speaker 2>taking an oxygen and it causes them to be able
<v Speaker 2>to move at insanely insane speeds and have insane reflexes.
<v Speaker 2>So it's like this hyper advanced arthropod predator is the
<v Speaker 2>first thing that pops up, like about the epitome of
<v Speaker 2>like advanced like metabolism. It's almost kind of like a
<v Speaker 2>little mammal p Yeah like that. Yeah, Well, at least
<v Speaker 2>the house centipedes are, and that's just this little group
<v Speaker 2>of them. But I mean there's like ones that are
<v Speaker 2>like you'll see in Borneo rainforest that get like half
<v Speaker 2>a foot long, I mean, and they are terrifying looking,
<v Speaker 2>look like something out of like a Tim Burton sort
<v Speaker 2>of like fingers right like those have they can, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they can the common house speed that people have in
<v Speaker 2>their houses. That scare the bejeezes out of them are
<v Speaker 2>are not are actually totally harmless and won't break skin,
<v Speaker 2>and they're they're quite beneficial to have around. So so
<v Speaker 2>I don't recommend killing them, but if you do see one,
<v Speaker 2>just remember that, Yeah, these things will probably run around
<v Speaker 2>right sure, looking exactly like that. It's it's super cool. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>So it gives me like a different respect for some
<v Speaker 2>of the things I see. But mites were really commonly
<v Speaker 2>preserved in there. There were you know, there's even brancing
<v Speaker 2>ectid's or the brankie pots. I think it was the
<v Speaker 2>like clam shrimp and the vernal pool brian shrimp. Basically, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>those things.
<v Speaker 1>Sea monkeys like sea monkey, right, yea, like sea monkeys
<v Speaker 1>basically are are in some of these hot spring environments.
<v Speaker 1>That doesn't surprise me because those things can drive. They're
<v Speaker 1>also desiccation teleran through their fucking everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>Man they are, and that actually you know, and that
<v Speaker 2>brings that to bear too. That you know, one of
<v Speaker 2>the one of the things that we think about like
<v Speaker 2>early terrustrial ecosystems, We're like, oh, these are like all
<v Speaker 2>these like swamp plants that only can grow like with
<v Speaker 2>wet feet. Basically and yeah, you have all these animals
<v Speaker 2>and plants that have been mastering getting out of the ocean,
<v Speaker 2>out of lakes, onto land. Really everything for them is
<v Speaker 2>figuring out how to survive in this horrific, horrific planet
<v Speaker 2>that is new to them. They're basically little astronauts trying
<v Speaker 2>to figure out how to live. And you know, plants
<v Speaker 2>were just they had to get cuticle, they had to
<v Speaker 2>develop ways to keep their water in and not release it.
<v Speaker 2>And it's just like every one of these structural innovations
<v Speaker 2>creating spores with a uvy basically reflecting coat of flavonoids
<v Speaker 2>and developing spoor oponents.
<v Speaker 1>Later. Oh yeah, because that's pretty cool. Okay, So let's
<v Speaker 1>bringing it back to the the three clades of lico lycopods.
<v Speaker 1>So moving on from lycopods from like the lycopodiums the
<v Speaker 1>club monsters, and moving on to Selaginella and Isohetes, because
<v Speaker 1>Selaginella and Isohetes are more closely related to each other
<v Speaker 1>than they are to the lycopods, right, they form their
<v Speaker 1>own little clade within the lycopods, Lycophytes, Is that true?
<v Speaker 2>That is true? So they they form their own clade,
<v Speaker 2>which is basically dividing from as you're saying, those homosporas
<v Speaker 2>are one score type to heterosporus having two score types
<v Speaker 2>licophytes and so so Laganella and Isoetes are their own
<v Speaker 2>two independent branches within that group. And it's likely that
<v Speaker 2>those these sorts of plants that we're developing, what they
<v Speaker 2>call heterospree, are two types of spores, which is basically
<v Speaker 2>similar in parallel the evolution of seeds and pollen.
<v Speaker 1>Right, but involved in the pillar. That's what's so fucking
<v Speaker 1>weird about it, man, heterospory and endospory. So the gametophyte
<v Speaker 1>is now inside the spot exactly.
<v Speaker 2>So the gamautifyte stays inside the spore like a little
<v Speaker 2>spaceship and it doesn't like leave, It stays its little capsule,
<v Speaker 2>and just like a seed, it basically forms an embryo
<v Speaker 2>inside and it's it's incredible, I mean, once after fertilization. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So these plants probably diverged sometime in the early Devonian,
<v Speaker 2>is what we think. Oh wow, that's far back, huh So,
<v Speaker 2>so at least the predecessor to the heterosporous lycophytes was
<v Speaker 2>probably start already somewhere on the landscape. By then, there
<v Speaker 2>were scale trees, if I remember correctly, there were homosporous
<v Speaker 2>scale trees in the Devonian, in the early Devonian. So
<v Speaker 2>some of the earliest tree lycopods that had developed basically
<v Speaker 2>secondary growth, they appear to be coming out of lineages
<v Speaker 2>of these homosporous groups.
<v Speaker 1>And these were true these, I mean, these were big,
<v Speaker 1>big guys.
<v Speaker 2>They some of them were, I mean they were probably
<v Speaker 2>like you know, some of these might have been I
<v Speaker 2>don't know, like fifteen twenty feet tall, which is good
<v Speaker 2>size for back then.
<v Speaker 1>But we're not adendron yet, not like we're.
<v Speaker 2>Not a lapidodendron size. Yeah, we're not like getting a
<v Speaker 2>six foot diameter trunk yet with one hundred foot long
<v Speaker 2>you know whatever rise off. Like I'm sorry, stig marian
<v Speaker 2>Acbe's coming out in every direction.
<v Speaker 1>That's fucking wild. To think about.
<v Speaker 2>Aguaro on steroids, it's like crazy. Yeah, yeah, they're they're wild.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, so they diverged sometime early Devonian, and they,
<v Speaker 2>you know, really diversified. By the late Devonian. You start
<v Speaker 2>seeing the predecessors of modern ice ese or quill warts.
<v Speaker 1>It was like four hundred million years ago about.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, this is probably well yeah, we're getting getting somewhere
<v Speaker 2>in the four hundred million years ago probably ranges when
<v Speaker 2>everything starts diverging. I think from this, this having this
<v Speaker 2>homosporous plan, I'd have to check basically what's been out
<v Speaker 2>there more recent publications, but I think I think by
<v Speaker 2>then you've already got something going on where you've got
<v Speaker 2>the route to heterospery has already been established, and there
<v Speaker 2>are some lineages trending toward that.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so what was the benefit of this? Why did
<v Speaker 1>it evolve and stick around what was selected for?
<v Speaker 2>It's a really good question. I mean one of the
<v Speaker 2>possibilities too, is I mean you really you start limiting
<v Speaker 2>your ability to basically I think it creates opportunities for
<v Speaker 2>outcrossing in many cases, but it also generates this sort
<v Speaker 2>of this differential parental investment on the different sportes. So
<v Speaker 2>being able to produce sperm is a much less energetic,
<v Speaker 2>costly process or a parent plant at least to bestow
<v Speaker 2>on it. It's going to to fight, you know, offspring
<v Speaker 2>than it is to form an egg or a nova
<v Speaker 2>basically an ovule, And so you basically have this this
<v Speaker 2>difference in allocation that where the ovule is getting a
<v Speaker 2>lot more of that parntal investment in this larger spore
<v Speaker 2>over time, and basically these microspores are getting a lot
<v Speaker 2>less and so I don't you know in terms of
<v Speaker 2>being able to I think ecologically one of the implications
<v Speaker 2>ends up being that, I mean, head osprey really allowed
<v Speaker 2>plants to move further inland and away from the water
<v Speaker 2>and have less dependency on water. These these plants are
<v Speaker 2>sort of in that in a hazy area though, because
<v Speaker 2>their sperm still is flagulated, it still has a tail,
<v Speaker 2>and it's still still swim mobile, so you're still dealing
<v Speaker 2>with this dependency on water, which you know, if you
<v Speaker 2>look at sort of the evolution of plants through the
<v Speaker 2>tree of life and through time, you see this decreasing
<v Speaker 2>dependency on water as a key theme in you as
<v Speaker 2>you look at the divergences of these more and more
<v Speaker 2>terrestrial plants as you grade toward flowering plants. Now that said,
<v Speaker 2>that sort of view of how we teach botany classes
<v Speaker 2>is well, it's teleological. It's basically we basically present I mean,
<v Speaker 2>two people learning about plants that there's a progression through time,
<v Speaker 2>which of course an evolution, there's an aimless wanderer a
<v Speaker 2>lot of times, and that things happen to work and
<v Speaker 2>happen to stick and then lead to some nice things.
<v Speaker 2>But a lot of times it's not deal in that
<v Speaker 2>the plant is not necessarily like, oh, I could be
<v Speaker 2>better at what I do by you know, just you know,
<v Speaker 2>I don't know. Lamark is sort of this the lum
<v Speaker 2>sort of evolutionary view of like, well, the giraffe could
<v Speaker 2>just stretch out its neck more and every generation will
<v Speaker 2>get better at what it does, grabbing bolthornicacias, you know.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, we kind of teach plants in plant
<v Speaker 2>biology classes a lot like that, And it's not to
<v Speaker 2>discredit how we teach, it's just kind of how we
<v Speaker 2>present it. And why I bring that up in particular
<v Speaker 2>is that lycophytes are doing these experiments, basically these evolutionary experiments,
<v Speaker 2>and they're they're converging in these very I mean, I
<v Speaker 2>guess we would call it like in a quote unquote
<v Speaker 2>advanced way. They're developing the basically an analogous way of
<v Speaker 2>reproducing to seed plants, but they're not seed plants. They're
<v Speaker 2>developing ways to grow into trees, but they don't produce
<v Speaker 2>the same kind of wood that seed plants or lignophytes do,
<v Speaker 2>and they've evolved roots independently through independent means of the
<v Speaker 2>other plants too, And so it's almost like with lycophytes,
<v Speaker 2>it's kind of like a Mister Potato, Like everything that
<v Speaker 2>makes it a plant that you see has been evolved
<v Speaker 2>independently of all the other plants.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's how That's the crazy thing. I mean, it's
<v Speaker 1>just they've been around that long that I mean, every
<v Speaker 1>god knows what else came up, Like what are the
<v Speaker 1>mutations came up that the environment is selected for. But
<v Speaker 1>this is what worked, and this is what the environment
<v Speaker 1>kept selecting for, is these traits like the heterospore, the endospory,
<v Speaker 1>the with with with the heterosport, the heterosprey did. So
<v Speaker 1>every every species of Selaginella and Isoetes will produce both
<v Speaker 1>a microspore a male sport, and a megasport a female spor. Right,
<v Speaker 1>they're and they're not dietious in other.
<v Speaker 2>Words, yes, they well, to my to my knowledge, they
<v Speaker 2>all produce megaspores and microspores. So the females the megagametophyte
<v Speaker 2>carrying a female spore. Quote, you know, in a sense,
<v Speaker 2>and then you have the microspore which carries the male gametophyte.
<v Speaker 2>There are times where some of these plants will act
<v Speaker 2>almost a little more like a dioecious plant. Now they
<v Speaker 2>won't be truly dioecious though, so so there are times
<v Speaker 2>like isuwetes, for instance, and some of the work we're
<v Speaker 2>currently doing with ice sweetes, we've been finding that there
<v Speaker 2>and you can see it sometimes in the field, but
<v Speaker 2>sometimes I suetes, which is literally that little basically onion
<v Speaker 2>looking plant or a little rush looking plant that you
<v Speaker 2>know grows the bottom of lakes and invernal pools. It
<v Speaker 2>basically the entire plant has been converted to a cone
<v Speaker 2>to a strobelus. It's reduced to a stroblus on a
<v Speaker 2>little micro block chunk of a former tree. Basically, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it is is weird.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a spheral arrangement of these leaves, except in
<v Speaker 1>this case the cone bracts are photosynthetic, right yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And so what will happen is effectively you can
<v Speaker 2>get plants where they'll alter what type of sporophilm or
<v Speaker 2>spore bearing leaf they'll form. So there will be some
<v Speaker 2>depending on the time of the year that will only
<v Speaker 2>be developing female spores megaspores, and there's other times you
<v Speaker 2>know they'll only be developing microsportes. And then if you know,
<v Speaker 2>you you hit these plants like let's say in a
<v Speaker 2>vernal pool where you have a very anomalous climatic year,
<v Speaker 2>like where you know they got basically a certain condition.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, this is all theoretical. You know, you could
<v Speaker 2>have the plants basically just produce female spores one year,
<v Speaker 2>some of them some others might be stuck in producing
<v Speaker 2>a male spore only, and they could effectively be dioecious
<v Speaker 2>in that way. Yeah, but only temporarily.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, but they've got the potential to produce both, so.
<v Speaker 2>To do both exactly. So let's you know how they regulate.
<v Speaker 2>That's different.
<v Speaker 1>So let's talk about So with Selaginella, especially because that's
<v Speaker 1>what you study, you you've found some pretty weird and
<v Speaker 1>I think it was selegend that you were studying with
<v Speaker 1>the extinction events right primarily or was it lycopods too.
<v Speaker 2>Or what so? So I've worked, Yeah, I work with
<v Speaker 2>all all sorts of likecopods, so all the different lineages
<v Speaker 2>at different times for different projects, depending but for for
<v Speaker 2>extinction work. I've worked specifically with ice sweeties mostly. Oh wow, okay,
<v Speaker 2>so tell us about that close to its heterosporous because.
<v Speaker 1>This is because this is some really interesting stuff. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>especially you were working with the Permian extinction, the Great
<v Speaker 1>Dying right first and foremost, right like that was the
<v Speaker 1>time period. Tell everybody about this and just tell us
<v Speaker 1>about your work.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So, so my work was sort of the Great
<v Speaker 2>Dying has been trying to figure out what happened to
<v Speaker 2>plant communities during yeah, the largest extinction or's history, and
<v Speaker 2>why did certain changes in plant communities around the world
<v Speaker 2>happen in the way that they appear in the fossil record.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, a big part of this is that,
<v Speaker 2>as you know, almost like ninety percent of multicellular life
<v Speaker 2>seems to disappear or blip out of most fossil assemblages
<v Speaker 2>across the planet. We see this tumultuous change in the
<v Speaker 2>plant communities that really, you know, is unusual in so
<v Speaker 2>many ways and it's not just like an like one
<v Speaker 2>of the things we think about with like a mass extinction.
<v Speaker 2>And probably the most famous example now that you know,
<v Speaker 2>has really been worked on is the asteroid impact of
<v Speaker 2>the Cretaceous paleogen R sixty.
<v Speaker 1>Six million years ago. Right, first off, let's let's let's
<v Speaker 1>get our mass extinctions now for anybody who's familiar, So
<v Speaker 1>there have been five, not including the one that we're
<v Speaker 1>causing with all our bullshit, there have been five big ones.
<v Speaker 1>The Permian two hundred and fifty one million years ago
<v Speaker 1>is like the whopper, like shit almost got totally knocked out,
<v Speaker 1>like everything died, everything, Like ninety six percent of life
<v Speaker 1>in the oceans.
<v Speaker 2>What was it?
<v Speaker 1>How much?
<v Speaker 2>What was it?
<v Speaker 1>The percentage of life on life? Yeah, and what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean it's yeah, I mean it varies depending
<v Speaker 2>on what groups you're looking at, but I mean, you know,
<v Speaker 2>basically we've said something like, you know, it's it's really
<v Speaker 2>high up there. I mean it's like eighty ninety percent.
<v Speaker 1>Life sucks. Life really.
<v Speaker 2>Sucked, and it sucks for a long time too afterward,
<v Speaker 2>which is partly what has been perplexing. So like with
<v Speaker 2>the the asteroid impact, you know, much more recent extinction
<v Speaker 2>with the with the dinosaurs dying out than the Permian.
<v Speaker 2>So the Permian extinction happens, and actually has been argued
<v Speaker 2>that without the Permian extinction, you might not have had
<v Speaker 2>the age of dinosaurs.
<v Speaker 1>Right, because dinosaurs hadn't even involved yet. It was what
<v Speaker 1>was a synacids or what was what came after the
<v Speaker 1>those weird There are relatives of mammals, but they had
<v Speaker 1>that big fan.
<v Speaker 2>Exactly. There were, yeah, relatives of mammals like demetrid on,
<v Speaker 2>the sale backed fan backed sort of mammal life. Reptiles
<v Speaker 2>we call them, which is a term that I think
<v Speaker 2>a lot of people who study synoposides are take great
<v Speaker 2>offense to. But for you know, for the purpose of this,
<v Speaker 2>I will acknowledge that that's probably it's a it's a
<v Speaker 2>description we use, but I guess it's helpful more for
<v Speaker 2>just context. These are basically a lineage of reptiles that
<v Speaker 2>have developed canines, differentiated teeth like mammals. They have whiskers,
<v Speaker 2>they have fur. Probably many of them were probably warm blooded.
<v Speaker 1>There's a lot ofists who are mad at both of
<v Speaker 1>us right now. You know, the first thing in their
<v Speaker 1>forehead gritting their teeth.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, oh yeah. The aino eruptions going on inside
<v Speaker 2>the heads of many many creative minds right now, I'm sure,
<v Speaker 2>And that's always part of that's always part of what's
<v Speaker 2>fun to be in this field is we always have
<v Speaker 2>have plenty to argue about, and you know, it's cool
<v Speaker 2>stuff to actually argue about. It really makes you think
<v Speaker 2>a lot of Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>I wish people argued about this kind of shit instead
<v Speaker 1>of the dumb shit you see in the comments section.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, yeah, going on, So, okay, So this is so.
<v Speaker 1>But Permian is two fifty one million years ago KT
<v Speaker 1>or whatever they're calling I know that it's not the
<v Speaker 1>KT and it's not called the KT anymore as sixty
<v Speaker 1>six million years ago, but that with that extinction, the
<v Speaker 1>dinosaur extinction is nothing compared to this one, right, What
<v Speaker 1>caused the Permian extinction? What is thought to have caused it?
<v Speaker 2>A lot probably a lot of things happening at the
<v Speaker 2>wrong time, is what the thought is so one of
<v Speaker 2>I mean, this has been a question we've been trying
<v Speaker 2>to work on for a while, of a least in
<v Speaker 2>the lab I've been and I am currently working with.
<v Speaker 2>And so we think that there is a and I
<v Speaker 2>think when we say we, I mean I think a
<v Speaker 2>lot of pale biologists and geologists have really seen a
<v Speaker 2>clear link in time between the formation of the largest
<v Speaker 2>volcanic Province or Igneus Province in its history of the
<v Speaker 2>Siberian Traps, at least in the history multicellar life and
<v Speaker 2>the disappearing of all these lineages of animals and and
<v Speaker 2>the basically biotic upheavals. So it seems like that the
<v Speaker 2>formation of the Siberian Traps larger I Gas Province is
<v Speaker 2>integrally tied with just the wholesale destruction of many ecosystems
<v Speaker 2>across the planet, both in the marine realm and terrestrially.
<v Speaker 2>And not only that, there's there is a correlation between
<v Speaker 2>a specific phase of volcanic activity of the Siberian Traps
<v Speaker 2>that seems to be connected with the onset of the
<v Speaker 2>real big pulses of extinction that happen so basically initially so,
<v Speaker 2>so the Siberian Traps are basically this igneous province that
<v Speaker 2>that spans the continent of like much of the continent
<v Speaker 2>of Asia through Russia, mostly through Russia in extent.
<v Speaker 1>So this is not a volcano. This is like a
<v Speaker 1>massive right, I mean, this is this is like you
<v Speaker 1>can't even call this a volcano. It's so fucking human.
<v Speaker 2>No, it's like a system of you know, probably a
<v Speaker 2>thousand gazillions of volcanoes that are in it, I mean
<v Speaker 2>over time, and they're all you know, there's eruptions, and
<v Speaker 2>there's massive lava flows going on that are basically forming
<v Speaker 2>and what is this almost like hydrothermal vent system that's
<v Speaker 2>happening on Land. It's a little like if you were
<v Speaker 2>to amplify Greenland's volcanism, like but have a lot more
<v Speaker 2>crazy stuff going on though, I mean, it's really one
<v Speaker 2>of the things that happen the onset of its development.
<v Speaker 2>As far as geologists have seen, it's been that there's
<v Speaker 2>been what's called extrusive volcanism, basically a lot of explosive
<v Speaker 2>volcanism of volcanoes that are you know, erupting at the
<v Speaker 2>surface of the planet. But there gets to be this
<v Speaker 2>point where there appears to be a switchover across much
<v Speaker 2>of this province from extrusive volcanism to intrusive volcanism basically
<v Speaker 2>being shut down above ground, and the lava moves laterally
<v Speaker 2>underground and fans out across Russia and Asia. And as
<v Speaker 2>it does and that lava moves through there, it basically
<v Speaker 2>comes into contact with vast, vast coal deposits across the
<v Speaker 2>area and most latitudely extensive sort of basically dykes and
<v Speaker 2>sil complex anderous history. And then it also contacts these massive,
<v Speaker 2>massive evaporated evapor basically evaporated seaways that were formed like
<v Speaker 2>in the Cambrian in this region. So there were kilometers
<v Speaker 2>thick salt deposits all over rock salt, and this lava
<v Speaker 2>was just moving right through them. And as it came
<v Speaker 2>into contact with salt and coal, it basically was outgassing
<v Speaker 2>these nasty, nasty halogens and volatile into the atmosphere. So
<v Speaker 2>the volcano is unleashing tons and tons of CO two
<v Speaker 2>for a good amount of time. But now that it's
<v Speaker 2>torching these coal deposits on a massive scale, like synchronously
<v Speaker 2>across many parts of this province, you have enormous amounts
<v Speaker 2>of methane and carbon dioxide emissions that are probably driving
<v Speaker 2>the world into this global warming just hell zone.
<v Speaker 1>So a bad problem became exponentially worse. It's just very quickly.
<v Speaker 1>So how are were these volcanoes erupting for I mean
<v Speaker 1>it's like a few thousand years, tens of thousands of years,
<v Speaker 1>millions of years.
<v Speaker 2>Or Yeah, there were probably pulses of this volcanism going on, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>for you know, at least tens of thousands of years
<v Speaker 2>to I mean, it goes basically there's thoughts that the
<v Speaker 2>cyberine trafts themselves may may have even been active, like
<v Speaker 2>from the end of the Permian period into toward the
<v Speaker 2>end of the early Triassic there might have still and
<v Speaker 2>pulses of volcanism going on within this region before it
<v Speaker 2>really quiesced. But I mean this was all sort of this,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, this was happening sort of in this pulse
<v Speaker 2>manner across the province. That there would be these these
<v Speaker 2>periods of probably more quiescent, like you know, less less
<v Speaker 2>eruptive activity.
<v Speaker 1>Right for a little bit, and then start back up again,
<v Speaker 1>and then it.
<v Speaker 2>Would just come back up. But you'd have, you know,
<v Speaker 2>over and over and over again. The cumulative sort of
<v Speaker 2>effect on you know, ravaging the atmosphere with this stuff
<v Speaker 2>would have been horrible. I mean, and the CO two
<v Speaker 2>is just part of it too. It's like, you know,
<v Speaker 2>you have the coal is a really big worry. What
<v Speaker 2>the team that I'm on has been really looking into
<v Speaker 2>is what's going on with the salt and what are
<v Speaker 2>the ramifications of the salt contact metamorphism with the lava,
<v Speaker 2>and that is that when you take rock salt and
<v Speaker 2>you vaporize it and then inject it into the atmosphere.
<v Speaker 2>I forgot to mention too that as these basically silcm
<v Speaker 2>plexes are moving around, you have explosive eruptive pipes that
<v Speaker 2>form these diatream complexes that basically will just explode through
<v Speaker 2>the hardened crust of the lavas that were formed from
<v Speaker 2>the previous forms and then ripped straight into the atmosphere.
<v Speaker 2>So it literally would inject with fire fountains right into
<v Speaker 2>the stratosphere basically ozone depleting voltile.
<v Speaker 1>So this is like the this is like planet Earth
<v Speaker 1>ate some bad sushi and then had like you know,
<v Speaker 1>just violent diarrhea and puking for like fifty thousand years,
<v Speaker 1>probably longer on and off with, but like a period
<v Speaker 1>of fifty thousand years, ten thousand years. That's where it's
<v Speaker 1>really going off, where it's really bad. I mean you
<v Speaker 1>run into the bathroom every thirty seconds. Yeah, just shitty.
<v Speaker 1>This sucks. I mean, this is getting bad. But I
<v Speaker 1>didn't think of it. I mean I knew it was
<v Speaker 1>a I knew about the deck and trash, but I
<v Speaker 1>didn't know about all this other stuff, like the lateral
<v Speaker 1>so like a dike is yeah, like a sill is
<v Speaker 1>like a lateral sill. Rather, it's like a lateral channel
<v Speaker 1>of a volcanic material underground, and that's then melting all
<v Speaker 1>these other previously deposited layers of CO two carbon and
<v Speaker 1>then that produces COEO two and then salt deposits, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>And what other weird shit was going to? You said, halogen?
<v Speaker 2>What was it? Some? Yeah, so there were just halogens
<v Speaker 2>being unreleased, unleashed by these lavas. So there's been some
<v Speaker 2>really neat studies by geochemists in Siberia looking at the
<v Speaker 2>chemistry of these contact metamorphism areas where you'd have these deep,
<v Speaker 2>deep eruptive pipes that we'd get through basically erupting through
<v Speaker 2>these these salt layers, and you'd have, yeah, you'd have
<v Speaker 2>direct mixing and contact metamorphism between rock, salt and lava,
<v Speaker 2>and so you'd be getting methyl bromine and methyl chlorine
<v Speaker 2>unleased straight into the asphere by some of these things.
<v Speaker 2>And it's really what's really troubling too, is that the
<v Speaker 2>stratosphere is lower, at least it's much easier to get
<v Speaker 2>to in the Arctic and the Antarctic like towards the poles.
<v Speaker 2>That's where basically the tropopause, where our troposphere, where all
<v Speaker 2>of our weather happens. The boundary between the troposphere and
<v Speaker 2>the stratosphere is lowest right at the North pole, in
<v Speaker 2>the South Pole, and so if you position your volcano
<v Speaker 2>right there, which the Cyberne traps most certainly were, you've
<v Speaker 2>got just a perfect, perfect delivery system for injecting this
<v Speaker 2>crap right up into the stratosphere and then circulating it
<v Speaker 2>around the world. So there are there have been studies
<v Speaker 2>that have been suggesting looking at these lavas that you'd
<v Speaker 2>have near total destruction of the ozonelier oh during phases,
<v Speaker 2>especially irene traps. So all that UV just comes pouring in. Now, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>what's destroying the the methyl bromide. Yeah, so the methyl
<v Speaker 2>chloride and the methyl bromide together, would you know either
<v Speaker 2>both of them are fantastic catalysts of ozone destruction. Basically though,
<v Speaker 2>when those the methyl bromine and the methyl chlorine, those
<v Speaker 2>volatile compounds, when they get transported up into the atmosphere,
<v Speaker 2>they can get up there because they're riding together, but
<v Speaker 2>once up there Basically the chlorine and the bromine have
<v Speaker 2>a strong affinity for the oxygen, and so they'll basically
<v Speaker 2>knock an oxygen off of each those three oxygen ozone
<v Speaker 2>of molecules and create two and just three oxygen radicals.
<v Speaker 2>And so it's basically like this nasty, horrible like game
<v Speaker 2>of billiard balls from hell on a on a molectro level,
<v Speaker 2>so us ripping holes in the ozone layer, and particularly
<v Speaker 2>too so so methyl chlorine is pretty effective ripping ozone holes.
<v Speaker 2>You know, in the atmosphere. Ethyl bromide is far more
<v Speaker 2>potent and far more destructive to ozone than chlorine. And
<v Speaker 2>it looks like the lavas were the regions. So the
<v Speaker 2>basically the the the strata that these these sills were
<v Speaker 2>passing through were very rich and bromine. And so it
<v Speaker 2>was really really wrong place at the wrong time.
<v Speaker 1>Probably damn that's fucked. So so but basically Earth lost
<v Speaker 1>the ozone there probably for for periods it was close.
<v Speaker 1>It just just disappeared and then it came back obviously,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you know, but for a period, I mean
<v Speaker 1>it was really really shitty. So not only is that
<v Speaker 1>there more CO two in the atmosphere, and these massive
<v Speaker 1>volcanic eruptions that last forever. You've also got all this
<v Speaker 1>UV starting to pour in because there's no ozone shield.
<v Speaker 1>There's no UV shield the right.
<v Speaker 2>Right exactly, so we're not we're no longer protected from
<v Speaker 2>a lot of the Sun's radiation on or surface during
<v Speaker 2>phases of this extinction. And so you know, looking at
<v Speaker 2>that geologic record, I mean, the geochemical records, it means
<v Speaker 2>seem pretty persuasive to me at least that you have
<v Speaker 2>this this stress that's pretty otherworldly literally that makes this
<v Speaker 2>very different than a normal you know event. And yet
<v Speaker 2>you really, we really didn't have we didn't have as
<v Speaker 2>much of an understanding of how how ozone weakening would
<v Speaker 2>affect basically plant communities worldwide during this sort of event,
<v Speaker 2>because this is a pre flowering plant time, so the
<v Speaker 2>forests were all dominated by basically seed bearing, seed bearing
<v Speaker 2>sorts of conifers and their relatives and seed ferns, and
<v Speaker 2>so so when I went, I mean, I had originally
<v Speaker 2>read about this sort of work when I was like,
<v Speaker 2>I was almost out of high school when I first
<v Speaker 2>picked up a paper about this, like starting college, and
<v Speaker 2>I was like, whoa, this is this is weird. One
<v Speaker 2>of the things that came up was that right around
<v Speaker 2>and and this sort of before I had as much
<v Speaker 2>of a knowledge of what was going on with the
<v Speaker 2>volcanism and the Siberian traps at this time. The first
<v Speaker 2>thing that got me hooked onto this extinction was that
<v Speaker 2>they're around the world. As things go to hell and
<v Speaker 2>hand basket, you have basically these these spol these spore
<v Speaker 2>spikes of isodes relatives that just start popping up everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>So basically you get these phases where IDEs relatives take
<v Speaker 2>over the world and they take over sometimes in places
<v Speaker 2>for millions of years. And this is weird because i
<v Speaker 2>odes is we know them today and as far as
<v Speaker 2>we've seen the fossil record, are like the epitome of
<v Speaker 2>a stress tolerator. They're there are plants that grows super slowly,
<v Speaker 2>they reproduce, I mean, they don't do anything very quickly.
<v Speaker 2>They're terrible competitors, and they basically thrive on nothing. So
<v Speaker 2>they basically can live and they you know, they're also practicing,
<v Speaker 2>you know, they can they can be a lot more
<v Speaker 2>plastic in their physiology. So like isot aliens, we call
<v Speaker 2>them that sort of the group that is modern icouse
<v Speaker 2>or quillworts are part of this fossil ancient group that
<v Speaker 2>are what we call quormous lycophytes. So they're basically these
<v Speaker 2>lycopods or lycophytes that have quorms, these subterranean, fleshy sort
<v Speaker 2>of storage organs. They're a little bit like a trunk,
<v Speaker 2>basically underground, and that makes them pretty much kind of
<v Speaker 2>a geophyte in a way. They the main plant itself
<v Speaker 2>is actually underground and all we see are the leaves
<v Speaker 2>protruding through through the surface of the soil or muck
<v Speaker 2>that they're growing in. And so they can they can
<v Speaker 2>practice camp photosynthesis just a succulent and so CAM photosynthesis. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>solycophytes evolved cam photosynthesis as well, independently like a yeah,
<v Speaker 2>like a cactus, and they'll and they do it a
<v Speaker 2>lot of times underwater, which is weird. So they have
<v Speaker 2>aquatic cam photosynthesis that they've they've developed, you know, probably
<v Speaker 2>over time, and it looks it's probable that many of
<v Speaker 2>their extinct relatives did practice camp photosynthesis at times, but
<v Speaker 2>they facultatively can switch depending on whether they're growing underwater
<v Speaker 2>or above water. They can develop CAM or C three
<v Speaker 2>photosynthesis so sometimes there's some isotains that don't even have
<v Speaker 2>stomata in their leaves, so it's it's wild. So like
<v Speaker 2>they're bringing up soil carbon through their roots, taking up
<v Speaker 2>fixing basically root carbon or carbon in the soil, and
<v Speaker 2>then using that as their co two in a way.
<v Speaker 2>So they're they're like the quill work group is truly
<v Speaker 2>alien in so many ways, Like they're just like plants
<v Speaker 2>from another planet.
<v Speaker 1>And they're the only relatives of these things that were
<v Speaker 1>once enormous and super dominant on Earth. That's even weirder too,
<v Speaker 1>It's like, why the fuck, it's super weird. This is
<v Speaker 1>all that made it through all those mass extinctions, just
<v Speaker 1>this little, this little guy, you know, this little thing,
<v Speaker 1>and we have these ones that are taking over the
<v Speaker 1>world during the Permian Crisis or the Permian Triassic extinction.
<v Speaker 1>And and when I first was picking up papers seeing this,
<v Speaker 1>basically the person who I contacted, the person who's writing these,
<v Speaker 1>her name is Cindy Loy, and she's at Smithsonian at
<v Speaker 1>the time, and I was like, hey, so you are
<v Speaker 1>describing that there are these there's these spikes of these
<v Speaker 1>these lycophytes spores, and not only that, but there's spikes
<v Speaker 1>of what look to be malformations in these fossil sports.
<v Speaker 1>So these spores basically are released in unseparated clusters of fours.
<v Speaker 2>They're like they're niotic products. Like it didn't like the
<v Speaker 2>plant either, didn't complete meosis properly. But you find across
<v Speaker 2>the planet like all these like little clusters of four
<v Speaker 2>spores everywhere in these environments where all the seed plants
<v Speaker 2>are pretty much blipping out of existence at least temporarily.
<v Speaker 2>They're not going fully extended. So this extension has already
<v Speaker 2>been going on. I mean, this is already right.
<v Speaker 1>Conditions are already shitty, but these ice of weed, these
<v Speaker 1>relatives are thriving, but they're making all these kind of
<v Speaker 1>half dud spores.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, at least from what we originally were thinking. So
<v Speaker 2>firston I reached out to you, Cindy. Basically it was like, oh, well,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's interesting because here's another paper that I
<v Speaker 2>wrote and it was looking at I basically section through
<v Speaker 2>these with colleagues. So she and her colleagues section through
<v Speaker 2>these spores using transmission electron microscopy techniques where they could
<v Speaker 2>see basically just how screwed up were these spores, and
<v Speaker 2>these fossil spores in turns, they morphologically look like they
<v Speaker 2>would have, you know, were they even mature, were the
<v Speaker 2>walls matured, they complete maturity. And so they turned out
<v Speaker 2>that yes, in fact, these spores look like they actually
<v Speaker 2>fully matured. They looked like they were in every other respect,
<v Speaker 2>they look okay. They're just linked together by these velcro
<v Speaker 2>like interlocking, ridiculously complex outer spore wall like filaments. So
<v Speaker 2>they basically a velcrode together and if you tap them apart,
<v Speaker 2>they'll just break apartment normal. And so there's a thought
<v Speaker 2>that maybe this was an adaptation to something weird going
<v Speaker 2>on back then and the UV sort of idea of
<v Speaker 2>plants getting blasted with UV radiation. It might be nice
<v Speaker 2>to have your spores kind of clustered together, especially since
<v Speaker 2>those spores are coated in glass. They're coded in silica.
<v Speaker 2>So i SES puts a silicoal air on its spores,
<v Speaker 2>which is pretty good. Yeah, so there might be adaptive
<v Speaker 2>benefits to this, And so the story started for me
<v Speaker 2>was like, well, how didlycophytes take over the planet during
<v Speaker 2>this time? And as we were saying earlier, you know,
<v Speaker 2>they need specific environments to survive, and you do need,
<v Speaker 2>as you were saying earlier, they need some sort of
<v Speaker 2>a quality of the environment to do, okay, like you
<v Speaker 2>do need for many of them at least today, some
<v Speaker 2>microrizon probably should be around, and you should have some
<v Speaker 2>some healthy intactness of the ecosystem. But here we are
<v Speaker 2>in this absolute just healthscape where these things are popping
<v Speaker 2>up like dandelions everywhere and there's nothing else in most environments.
<v Speaker 2>So I basically went in was like what would allow
<v Speaker 2>these plants to survive and other things to fail? And
<v Speaker 2>for that we're talking about like forest suppression in places
<v Speaker 2>for millions of years. Like there's areas where the forests
<v Speaker 2>may have been suppressed for as long as the span
<v Speaker 2>of between the evolution of Lucy and us, like you know,
<v Speaker 2>hominids and US. No forests in some regions.
<v Speaker 1>Like five million, seven million years, like five million years.
<v Speaker 2>And this is easy.
<v Speaker 1>So you're talking about the foss work. You're looking so
<v Speaker 1>you're looking at micro fossils, and for like five million years,
<v Speaker 1>you're seeing a paucity of species diversity in the fossil record,
<v Speaker 1>like there's just not a lot of stuff, like very
<v Speaker 1>few things around during this great dying event.
<v Speaker 2>Correct and and you and you see similar trends across
<v Speaker 2>the planet. Now you know, like those sorts of environments
<v Speaker 2>may not have been the norm where you know that
<v Speaker 2>the succession would be on halt for that long. I
<v Speaker 2>mean usually I think things would be in the adders
<v Speaker 2>manner of like thousands to tens of thousands of years.
<v Speaker 2>But still that's a heck of a lot of time
<v Speaker 2>to delay succession, Like that's weird. And you know, for
<v Speaker 2>for reference, like the the asteroid impact that is correlate
<v Speaker 2>with the disappearance of non avian dinosaurs, there was a
<v Speaker 2>fer and spike and it was widespread, but it really
<v Speaker 2>wasn't that long, Like it was only probably like you know,
<v Speaker 2>we might be talking decades in terms of when the
<v Speaker 2>ferns were dominant and then how everything was rebooted thereafter.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, the folks I've talked to have studied that
<v Speaker 2>fern spike had been like it's analogus to like if
<v Speaker 2>you just cut down the rainforest and the ferns came up.
<v Speaker 2>It's like they kind of just do what they do.
<v Speaker 1>And again, this is just looking at micro fossils, at
<v Speaker 1>fossil spores entombed in rock, right, Yeah, in that period
<v Speaker 1>of a lot damn So how I didn't know after
<v Speaker 1>the k the extinction it was that so it was
<v Speaker 1>not that long.
<v Speaker 2>It probably wasn't comparatively like and again we're we're using
<v Speaker 2>the Permian triacity extinction as a reference here, so like
<v Speaker 2>we really have a distorted sense like that succession was
<v Speaker 2>crazy and it was I'm sure a lot more delayed
<v Speaker 2>because i mean we're talking about years of darkness after
<v Speaker 2>the asteroid impact. But really the story with that, I
<v Speaker 2>mean is just can you survive in the dark in
<v Speaker 2>a spore bank for a while. The answer is yes,
<v Speaker 2>most things. Yeah, sure, it's nothing for most plants on
<v Speaker 2>the planet to survive a little while. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>if you're talking like tens of thousands of years, I
<v Speaker 2>mean that's where things start falling apart, like in terms
<v Speaker 2>of like ecosystems, like they just the how we know them,
<v Speaker 2>Like things just go out of whack and everything gets
<v Speaker 2>re scrambled and reassembled in a very weird way, and
<v Speaker 2>you get into what's basically like a new steady state,
<v Speaker 2>a new baseline where you have these low diversity, persistent
<v Speaker 2>ecosystems dominated by these like ice eds, relatives, and I think,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's kind of business as usual for them,
<v Speaker 2>like during those periods, they're just like, well, nothing's wrong.
<v Speaker 2>This is just what we do.
<v Speaker 1>That's so cool though, But it was I mean, again
<v Speaker 1>to re emphasize this was really I mean, the planet
<v Speaker 1>was essentially almost sterilized, like there was just it was
<v Speaker 1>so long that conditions were this lousy for life that
<v Speaker 1>a lot of stuff just started After a while, things
<v Speaker 1>just start dropping off.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean in some interior parts of Pangaea, the
<v Speaker 2>super continent at this time. Howthough the continents were mainly
<v Speaker 2>globed together during this time, you probably have temperatures like
<v Speaker 2>one hundred and thirty fahrenheit plus on average in some
<v Speaker 2>of these areas cow or what. Yeah, probably from the
<v Speaker 2>build up of the CO two over time. And then
<v Speaker 2>one of the really devastating effects in research I think
<v Speaker 2>that's come out more recently was that really a big
<v Speaker 2>part of the destruction of the environment comes down to
<v Speaker 2>deforestation in some ways, at least on land, and it
<v Speaker 2>certainly had feedback loops with the marine realm, the destruction
<v Speaker 2>of the forests and the delayed recession or delayed succession
<v Speaker 2>of them. So the trees weren't around to take up
<v Speaker 2>that CO two as much. So trees are hanging on,
<v Speaker 2>but they're hanging on in places like you know, probably Israel, Jordan,
<v Speaker 2>places like that where we're kind of dealing with paleotropics
<v Speaker 2>a latitude. It's where you know, you had these plant
<v Speaker 2>plant lineages. They see plant linages surviving the crisis, but
<v Speaker 2>they're not in such huge coverage across the plant they
<v Speaker 2>can bring down the CO two fast enough, and so
<v Speaker 2>you have this absolute runaway greenhouse from hell, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>it just really magnifies. In the Triassic and the early Traassic,
<v Speaker 2>that was a bad time to be around.
<v Speaker 1>Most of the Yeah, I was going to say, well,
<v Speaker 1>first off, and most of them will finished that really quick.
<v Speaker 1>I want to I want to hear that pure yeah
<v Speaker 1>a little bit, most of the Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So most of like the synapsids, the like mammal like
<v Speaker 2>reptiles that survived the crisis were burrowers. They lived underground
<v Speaker 2>for most of the time and probably were nocturnal for
<v Speaker 2>all we know. You know, things like Lystrosaurus was probably
<v Speaker 2>the most common one. It's an adorable it looks like
<v Speaker 2>a dugone on land with little little cute tusks in
<v Speaker 2>its mouth like a higher ax meets a dugone with
<v Speaker 2>a bit of a tail, not much, but very very
<v Speaker 2>you know, barrel chested, front, front loaded like bulldog like
<v Speaker 2>build and a little carries adorable features. So what was there?
<v Speaker 1>What was going on with the UV at this time?
<v Speaker 2>Though?
<v Speaker 1>Really quick?
<v Speaker 2>I mean is that yeah?
<v Speaker 1>I mean basically the ozone was depleted for a while,
<v Speaker 1>so you just had UV pouring in. I mean, is
<v Speaker 1>that still the case or what we think?
<v Speaker 2>So we think that there probably would have been pulse
<v Speaker 2>destruction of the ozone layer, repeated pulses and cyclical pulses,
<v Speaker 2>so the the ozone layer will repair itself very quickly.
<v Speaker 2>So when when we when we started like pulling the
<v Speaker 2>plug on putting CFC's like chlorofluorocarbons from our refrigerators back
<v Speaker 2>in the eighties with the Montreal protocol, the ozone over Antarctica,
<v Speaker 2>the ozone hole that really forms that was man made
<v Speaker 2>back in the eighties really started he healing pretty quickly,
<v Speaker 2>like we're now currently on track to you know it
<v Speaker 2>healing I think on the level of several decades from now,
<v Speaker 2>so you know, it's on the order of tens of
<v Speaker 2>years to healing from from an input of you know, volatiles.
<v Speaker 2>But the problem is, again, you've got thousands and tastins
<v Speaker 2>of these eruptive pipes that are forming all over the
<v Speaker 2>Ciberne traps at different times randomly. So each one of
<v Speaker 2>these eruptive pipes might have had the capacity to rip
<v Speaker 2>a massive hole zone hole and it just and you're
<v Speaker 2>also basically combining with with global warming, you might have
<v Speaker 2>some exacerbation of some of those holes persisting longer. There's
<v Speaker 2>there's some anecdotal it's not acdotal, but there's actually some
<v Speaker 2>some work that's been suggesting that you know, wildfires and
<v Speaker 2>things like that will prolongozone holes. So you know, there's
<v Speaker 2>there's a concoction of these positive feedback loops that are
<v Speaker 2>probably going on that are making this what should be
<v Speaker 2>a short termed stress possibly persist longer than it should
<v Speaker 2>is I think the.
<v Speaker 1>Thought but isoeatees that these isoetes relatives are doing fine.
<v Speaker 1>What's going on with their sports where their sporm sports
<v Speaker 1>seemingly uh bound together or be formed or whatever.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the thought the thought originally was that they were mutated,
<v Speaker 2>and so there was a hypothesis that was proposed called
<v Speaker 2>the mutagenesis hypothesis, where basically the world went to hello
<v Speaker 2>handbasket because of mass mutations going on. That the world
<v Speaker 2>was being like just completely you know, radiated, and mutations
<v Speaker 2>were just you know, running a mock and a lot
<v Speaker 2>of things, and that the the lycophytes were one of
<v Speaker 2>the few things that were surviving and giving us something
<v Speaker 2>in the fossil record to see. Now, you know, the
<v Speaker 2>work I currently am doing is on figuring out what's
<v Speaker 2>going on with those lycophytes. But the work I did
<v Speaker 2>previously during my graduate school years was looking at what
<v Speaker 2>happened to the forests and how did basically the forest
<v Speaker 2>collapses happen and allow for these licopytes to do well.
<v Speaker 2>And what we did find was, I mean, about a
<v Speaker 2>year after the publication that talked about these global abnormalities
<v Speaker 2>and the spores of the lycophytes came out, a year
<v Speaker 2>later a paper came out by another group of researchers saying, hey,
<v Speaker 2>we found seed plant pol that's malformed in China and
<v Speaker 2>Russia right around this time too, and seems really abundant
<v Speaker 2>in these places as these forts are collapsing and lo
<v Speaker 2>and behold over time. You see this trend in a
<v Speaker 2>lot of different parts of the world. Not every part
<v Speaker 2>of the world, but you do see them pretty often
<v Speaker 2>in many different assemblages that you'll see what looks to
<v Speaker 2>be what they were calling mutagenic pollen of disappearing forest trees.
<v Speaker 2>So the trees basically show a spike in these malformations
<v Speaker 2>and then they blip out, which is very, very troubling.
<v Speaker 2>And these are the same types of malformations you see
<v Speaker 2>at Chernobyl in the pines and at Chernobyl same time,
<v Speaker 2>types of deviations in morphology.
<v Speaker 1>So they were getting it was getting weird. They were
<v Speaker 1>making this weird pollen and then they just go extinct.
<v Speaker 1>They just disappear from the fossil record.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, and well and when they disappear to the
<v Speaker 2>funny part is, so we have these like these repeated
<v Speaker 2>cycles of deforestation and slow recovery, and what tends to
<v Speaker 2>happen is that the animals blip out really quickly. Like
<v Speaker 2>the big crisis for the marine realm is these pulses
<v Speaker 2>of extinction are huge for the animals and they just
<v Speaker 2>don't come back. But the plants are kind of stuck
<v Speaker 2>in this weird like they're almost like in limbo in
<v Speaker 2>a way. They go through this weird limbo type cycle
<v Speaker 2>like cycle of hell where they keep getting whacked over
<v Speaker 2>and over and over again by something in the environment.
<v Speaker 2>And maybe u V played a part in this, maybe
<v Speaker 2>other things did too. We don't fully know yet. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>it could have been a combination of a lot of factors.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, it seems that the tree the tree
<v Speaker 2>like lineages and woody seed plants are just not doing
<v Speaker 2>well over and over again. And then every time they
<v Speaker 2>get blipped out, the licophytes move in, and they're moving
<v Speaker 2>in from these spore banks that they left behind from
<v Speaker 2>their last insurgencies. So it's this very dynamic ecological seesaw
<v Speaker 2>or teeter totter where you're either it's like conifers versusleopods.
<v Speaker 2>Either your your seed your seed plants are doing well
<v Speaker 2>and your diverse fern and seed plant and horse tale
<v Speaker 2>communities are doing fine, or your locopods are doing well.
<v Speaker 1>It's crazy that you can tell so much about this
<v Speaker 1>ecosystem from so like phenomena long ago, like two hundred
<v Speaker 1>and fifty one million years ago. That's insane, Like before
<v Speaker 1>the dinosaurs of all.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Yeah, and it's really comes down to a lot
<v Speaker 2>of the work that the paleopalinologists, people who stay fossilized pollenancepores.
<v Speaker 2>Really that ends up being most of the information we
<v Speaker 2>get comes from the pollen and the spora records, and
<v Speaker 2>basically the places where this got sort of triangulated I
<v Speaker 2>think the most are some deposits like in Greenland. My
<v Speaker 2>colleague Cindy Layer, who I had talked to and eventually
<v Speaker 2>worked in the lab of on these questions, she went
<v Speaker 2>in earlier in her career and looked at basically describing
<v Speaker 2>with colleagues what was going on with plant communities in
<v Speaker 2>pollen and spore assemblages that landed in the ocean, in
<v Speaker 2>the dead zones of the ocean. So as basically the
<v Speaker 2>fossil record of the ocean is capturing these events going on.
<v Speaker 2>The pollen raining down from the nearby coast is raining
<v Speaker 2>down synchronously to see what's going on the plant commune
<v Speaker 2>is the same time the animals are blipping out, And
<v Speaker 2>that was sort of where this you know, you could
<v Speaker 2>get this correlation of what's going on on land with
<v Speaker 2>plants and in the ocean with animals.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, permian permian took out the trilobites, right, that's when
<v Speaker 1>they flip out.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, that was an unfortunate casualty. I must say
<v Speaker 2>that would have been a darn cool thing to see.
<v Speaker 1>Still, yeah, I wish, man. Can you imagine if there
<v Speaker 1>was their fucking so every kid knows what the trilobytes are. Man,
<v Speaker 1>it's like the coolest fossils, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they would have been probably like, yeah, you'd be
<v Speaker 2>out there, I don't know, snorkeling or something like, damn
<v Speaker 2>the trilobites, yeah, or trilobytes, ah, stupid trilobites. Are there
<v Speaker 2>any macro fossils from these these Isoetes relatives? Like, do
<v Speaker 2>you have any idea what they looked like? If they
<v Speaker 2>were small? And they were probably big because the pollen
<v Speaker 2>seems like it's so abundant, right, But I mean, is
<v Speaker 2>did you have any good like tissues like leaf tissues
<v Speaker 2>or stems or anything? There are? Yeah, And in fact,
<v Speaker 2>there's only like maybe a handful of genera of these
<v Speaker 2>is odes relatives that were preserved and they've been found,
<v Speaker 2>you know, macro fossils of them, the most probably the
<v Speaker 2>most popularized of these, I guess within the extinction community
<v Speaker 2>is called plural Maya and pleur Maa is is basically
<v Speaker 2>another one of these sorts of pipe cleaners on acid
<v Speaker 2>in a way, but it's basically like a little Christmas
<v Speaker 2>tree pipe cleaner. It's a it's a plant that actually
<v Speaker 2>functions a lot like a silver sort in ways. It's
<v Speaker 2>a monocarp, so it basically would form a big anchor
<v Speaker 2>like corm underground that had little lobes, and from that
<v Speaker 2>corm it would grow slowly early on in life, throwing
<v Speaker 2>out these big fleshy basically great white shark tooth shaped
<v Speaker 2>leaves that would just kind of splay on the ground
<v Speaker 2>like a well witched early on, and then over time
<v Speaker 2>is switched from this like big juicy icy wds looking
<v Speaker 2>thing to suddenly would spike up and bolt and form
<v Speaker 2>this one big strobelus at the top of spore cone.
<v Speaker 1>God, yeah, I'm looking at a photo online plural Maya
<v Speaker 1>for anyone Elms to look at up p L e
<v Speaker 1>U R O M e I A. Yeah, it looks
<v Speaker 1>like a silver sword, you're right, like a wine silver sord.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And they would have functioned a lot like that.
<v Speaker 2>They're they're simil paris so they basically they'll they'll reproduce
<v Speaker 2>once and then they die. And as far as we know,
<v Speaker 2>and you know, my colleagues Cindy Loy and Evo Downstay
<v Speaker 2>did a super cool paper I think back in twenty
<v Speaker 2>twenty one where they basically looked at these fossils all
<v Speaker 2>over Europe of these you know plurimia from like Sandstone
<v Speaker 2>and places from the crisis, where they could see how
<v Speaker 2>the leaves were arranged on the stems and they were
<v Speaker 2>able to basically figure out that the growth basically that
<v Speaker 2>the growth rate changed across the life cycle this plant.
<v Speaker 2>Looking at the insertion points basically as units of time,
<v Speaker 2>like how distant the leaves were spaced on the stem
<v Speaker 2>became a measure a proxy of how quickly they were growing.
<v Speaker 2>And they were finding that they start out slow, really
<v Speaker 2>growing probably for a while, building up a lot of
<v Speaker 2>mass netcorn, and then they bolted eventually right before basically
<v Speaker 2>spawn and die. Had this like real fast like spike
<v Speaker 2>that's a lot like a flower spike in a nagave maybe,
<v Speaker 2>and then they would set spores and then yeah, they'd
<v Speaker 2>be done.
<v Speaker 1>They're mostly like six foot tall, about six to nine feet.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, something like that. You know, some of the
<v Speaker 2>might have been only three feet lot. We're probably small,
<v Speaker 2>but some could have gotten about six feet. Cool.
<v Speaker 1>Oh geez, I love thinking weird.
<v Speaker 2>To walk through a field of these things.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what's another genus? What's another genus? You know that
<v Speaker 1>I could look up right now. That was going off.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Another another one that was back then was called
<v Speaker 2>Anna Lepis, and it has a N N a l
<v Speaker 2>e pis. And some of them, and some of the
<v Speaker 2>Pleuramaya species may have been leafless even if I remember correctly.
<v Speaker 2>So there's some of these where they're just leafless stalks
<v Speaker 2>almost where they're just photosynthesizing stem. It's very weird, very reduced.
<v Speaker 1>How big was.
<v Speaker 2>I don't think it might not have been quite as
<v Speaker 2>big as plural maya, or it might have been might
<v Speaker 2>have been a few feet tall, some of them small,
<v Speaker 2>maybe two feet some of them.
<v Speaker 1>The Triassic like cops. It's Pleuri Maya and Analepis. Relationships
<v Speaker 1>evolution and origin. God man, that's so cool. That's like
<v Speaker 1>a fucking sci fi novel.
<v Speaker 2>They're all and they're desert plants too, so these are
<v Speaker 2>these are succulentlycopods, so they're living in Xeric doing probably
<v Speaker 2>doing camphotosynthesis. There's research I think that is being done
<v Speaker 2>currently to looking into this that will be coming out soon.
<v Speaker 2>At LISTA saw a presentation on recently. They're it seems
<v Speaker 2>like they're practicing camp photosynthesis. Uh, and they're they're living
<v Speaker 2>in the desert, like just chilling in. I mean, I
<v Speaker 2>don't know if they were tolering one hundred and thirty degrees.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, some of these things might not have
<v Speaker 2>I might have had a colleague who was telling me
<v Speaker 2>I thought that some of them might not even have
<v Speaker 2>had stomata. At times they were right through the tissue
<v Speaker 2>the roots. Oh, right through the roots, possibly harvesting out
<v Speaker 2>of the ground, kind of like modern ice swetes at
<v Speaker 2>the bottom of some lakes or in the Andes. There's
<v Speaker 2>one I sweeties up there and Dick Cola that does
<v Speaker 2>that what used to be called stilites, and it I
<v Speaker 2>think it lacks stomata, but it lives in like water
<v Speaker 2>log soils high up the andies. Yeah, weird things like
<v Speaker 2>we really just know so little about them at the
<v Speaker 2>end of the day, like this, what we do know
<v Speaker 2>about them is weird, bizarre and confusing.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but they're but they're opportunistic during this extremely shy
<v Speaker 1>period on Earth.
<v Speaker 2>They're thriving, right exactly, They're thriving. And it's a time
<v Speaker 2>again when like ferns are doing badly. Ferns are Ferns
<v Speaker 2>are not able to take this stuff. Horse tales aren't
<v Speaker 2>doing great. Like there's there's some places where horse tales
<v Speaker 2>are kind of eking it in there with Plurimea as
<v Speaker 2>odd bedfellows, but it's kind of like even those plants
<v Speaker 2>are having a hard time. So it's like, yeah, you
<v Speaker 2>really these things had to be tough as nails for
<v Speaker 2>whatever they were surviving.
<v Speaker 1>But also somewhere in there the ancestor of conifers was
<v Speaker 1>hanging out to I mean, it's like, yeah, I love
<v Speaker 1>this stuff already.
<v Speaker 2>Well already there were the conifers had already been diversifying early.
<v Speaker 2>So there was something like I thought there was something
<v Speaker 2>like twenty or thirty lineages of early early conifer that
<v Speaker 2>it went into the extinction, So started in the Permian.
<v Speaker 2>Going into the extinction, you had something like twenty or
<v Speaker 2>thirty lineages of early conifer groups and I think only
<v Speaker 2>one of them made it through the crisis alive.
<v Speaker 1>What was what was what what lineage was it? Was
<v Speaker 1>it Eric Carrier or Potocarpesi or the ancestor of both
<v Speaker 1>of them are in idea.
<v Speaker 2>I think it was something even even earlier diversion than that.
<v Speaker 2>There was probably I think the what was it the
<v Speaker 2>Walkian So there was a group called Walkian confers. They're
<v Speaker 2>super super beautiful things. They look like Norfolk Island pines reconstructions.
<v Speaker 2>So it's spelled w A L.
<v Speaker 1>C h I A n Wulkian.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Fuck, but these are I mean, these are there's good
<v Speaker 1>macro fossils of these obviously.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, great macro fossils. These you can find them some
<v Speaker 2>places in the southwestern United States. You can find them.
<v Speaker 2>Oh wow, oh.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah it does. It looks like it looks like
<v Speaker 1>a Norfolk Island kind of. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>They're beautiful things and the fossils are, Yeah, the fossils
<v Speaker 2>are just absolutely jaw dropping. They're gorgeous, gorgeous, feathery planated
<v Speaker 2>Norfolk Island pine like branches, bows that would dehiss off
<v Speaker 2>of the plants basically as probably a fire adaptation was
<v Speaker 2>recent research was done in the lab I was in
<v Speaker 2>even and yeah, so like things like I think the walkins,
<v Speaker 2>I think drop out or blip out then, But you know,
<v Speaker 2>you have the extinction of all of these other sort
<v Speaker 2>of oddball early conifer relatives and forerunners too. But interestingly enough,
<v Speaker 2>coming out of the crisis, you already have something that's
<v Speaker 2>in the potocarp lineage that was discovered I think in Jordan,
<v Speaker 2>suggesting that basically potocarp lineage plants may have actually predated
<v Speaker 2>the extinction and made it through. Wow, so already it
<v Speaker 2>was quite a bit of And if that's the case,
<v Speaker 2>you would have thought that the pine, the pines and
<v Speaker 2>their their lineage would have already been around because they
<v Speaker 2>break off his sister group from all the other conifers earliest.
<v Speaker 1>Right, they're more closely related to like need thems and stuff,
<v Speaker 1>aren't they, I think?
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, yeah, need them.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I have to look back at the Nali's biologies. I
<v Speaker 2>always am wondering what where are they placed in conifers.
<v Speaker 2>But it would make yeah, I mean, if that's my
<v Speaker 2>recent stuff, I wouldn't be surprised total caps were that's crazy,
<v Speaker 2>so ancestors of Remus and total Carpus, Yeah, was already
<v Speaker 2>around and somehow made it through.
<v Speaker 1>That really really brutally.
<v Speaker 2>Extinctively did yeah, and and well which ya was? You know,
<v Speaker 2>well witchia and E fedra and those sorts of things.
<v Speaker 2>You know, there were there were fedrin type pollen types.
<v Speaker 2>There was well which well which you like pollen types
<v Speaker 2>around the crisis, those things were already well established. Well
<v Speaker 2>whichia used to be a huge group, right, weren't there
<v Speaker 2>There were like dozens of species and then oh yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and they they have these if I remember correctly, I
<v Speaker 2>wonder if it was like they had like football pollen
<v Speaker 2>shapes or something like that. But like I remember colleagues
<v Speaker 2>being in lab being like, okay, yep, pollen here. It's like,
<v Speaker 2>oh my gosh, so it's super distinct, yeah, extinct ones.
<v Speaker 2>When you guys are looking at fossil pollen, how do
<v Speaker 2>you I mean, how do you do that? Do you
<v Speaker 2>have to dissolve the rock with something first? Or is
<v Speaker 2>it yeah, you got to use I mean a lot
<v Speaker 2>of people use hydrofluoric acid to break down rocks to
<v Speaker 2>get to this stuff. I mean, it's just it's gnarly.
<v Speaker 2>I myself have not done I personally haven't done fossil
<v Speaker 2>pollen and spore prep myself, But I mean all my
<v Speaker 2>colleagues who do it, it's just like, oh my god. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they're suiting up to go down the acid lab to really.
<v Speaker 1>I mean.
<v Speaker 2>It's yeah, it's really scary. I mean there's a buddy
<v Speaker 2>system involved, like it's you know, you've got to work
<v Speaker 2>with HF to break down a lot of these rocks.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, though, it's so, I mean, you're unlocking this time capsule.
<v Speaker 1>So what So the pollen doesn't get eaten, but the
<v Speaker 1>matrix that it's in gets eaten by the acid exactly.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the matrix gets eaten by the acid and leaves
<v Speaker 2>behind the pollen, and.
<v Speaker 1>The pollen is like permenalized with silica or something or what.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I think in many cases, I'm trying to remember
<v Speaker 2>if it hydrofluoric probably takes out the silica too, probably, know,
<v Speaker 2>because yeah, like hydrofluoric, you have to you have to
<v Speaker 2>store the acid in plastic like nalgene. Basically, you can't
<v Speaker 2>stor it in glass because it'll eat through the glass.
<v Speaker 1>God damn Jesus.
<v Speaker 2>It's nasty stuff. Hydrofluoric is scary, Like a drop of
<v Speaker 2>that stuff and you're like dead, like before you know it.
<v Speaker 2>Like it's horrible. Yeah, yeah, like there will be times
<v Speaker 2>like there's these horror stories about palnology laps where it's
<v Speaker 2>been used and there'd be like some of it got
<v Speaker 2>out of the humut or some of it was dropped
<v Speaker 2>on the floor, and it's like they evacuate the building.
<v Speaker 2>Like it's like Lily Scott Alien, Like it's gonna go
<v Speaker 2>through the floor.
<v Speaker 1>I was gonna say, I thought of the Alien movies.
<v Speaker 2>Man, I'm like, what, Yeah, it's like right from that,
<v Speaker 2>like it'll just keep going. Yeah, I think yeah, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>I know, like for like glassic can certainly go. I
<v Speaker 2>don't know for other structures, like how the chemistry is.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's crazy about But what you're left with is
<v Speaker 1>basically so the matrix dissolves and then you're left with
<v Speaker 1>these little I mean, can you see them with the
<v Speaker 1>naked eye even or what some of them?
<v Speaker 2>Some of them you can, so the the io Italians
<v Speaker 2>or the ice sweeties spores you can on some things
<v Speaker 2>so like modern for instance, modern i sweetz has the
<v Speaker 2>largest spores of any plant in the world.
<v Speaker 1>No huge, Wow.
<v Speaker 2>You just pick them up in your hand. They're like
<v Speaker 2>micro micromant dip and' do you know what?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, my friend, my friend Matt Berger, got really good
<v Speaker 1>photos of one, like took him under a microscope too.
<v Speaker 1>But even like at the base of the little you know,
<v Speaker 1>then this is like a two inch tall inch tall plant,
<v Speaker 1>at the base of those leaves, you could, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you could already see the spores. It was kind of wild,
<v Speaker 1>like they are really large. I remember that because, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>they're at the base of those like if you imagine onion,
<v Speaker 1>you know, they're like the base of the onion sheath,
<v Speaker 1>the leaf sheaths.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly, yeah, and you'll see and many times in ice,
<v Speaker 2>these they'll they'll disintegrate, so they'll they'll basically the leaves
<v Speaker 2>might stay on the plant and they might disintegrate over time,
<v Speaker 2>and that's what opens up and a niches the spores.
<v Speaker 2>But the spores will often be buried in the ground
<v Speaker 2>around the parent plant and they can wait there, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and the dormant for quite some time. I mean, megaspores
<v Speaker 2>and icuds have quite a bit of longevity, and so
<v Speaker 2>you know, that may have figured into the extinction for
<v Speaker 2>all we know.
<v Speaker 1>But for but for a spora fight to be created,
<v Speaker 1>you need a male sport, a microsport, and a female sport.
<v Speaker 1>A megasport to land next to each other or what.
<v Speaker 2>Just yeah, a lot of times probably in close vicinity.
<v Speaker 2>But once there's a film of water or water in
<v Speaker 2>the ground, groundwater that they can move through, imagine they
<v Speaker 2>could travel little ways. I mean, these these megaspores, so
<v Speaker 2>that the female gametophyte probably is releasing some sort of
<v Speaker 2>an attractant for the sperm to come to it. And
<v Speaker 2>then in many cases too particularly I mean I'm less
<v Speaker 2>familiar with like solajanelle in terms of the breeding system
<v Speaker 2>with with regards to basically the movement of microsportes. But
<v Speaker 2>I know that in ice ds, in aquatic systems where
<v Speaker 2>they're in the water and they're submerged, the microspores end
<v Speaker 2>up often sticking to the the exterior of the megaspore,
<v Speaker 2>and so they'll just it's almost like this little spaceships
<v Speaker 2>docking on a big like little death start. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>So once that sperm emerges from the microsport, there's not
<v Speaker 1>too far to sort.
<v Speaker 2>You just go right into the Yeah, right to the archagonia.
<v Speaker 1>Is what does the sperm look like in isowheedies. I
<v Speaker 1>mean it doesn't look like human sperm, like a weird
<v Speaker 1>I should look that up.
<v Speaker 2>It's another thing that looks like it's Averridley Scott movie.
<v Speaker 2>Like it's it's really it's insane. It's got multiple tales.
<v Speaker 1>So kind of like Ginko. It's so funny. So many
<v Speaker 1>people don't know. So many people don't know, and I
<v Speaker 1>can't say I blame them, because how would you know
<v Speaker 1>unless you're looking under a microscope. But I mean, like
<v Speaker 1>game Goes, psychads, ferns, mobile sperm. They're moving sperm. It's
<v Speaker 1>sperm that swims. You normally don't think of plant parts,
<v Speaker 1>you know, with mobility exactly, And that's that's a huge part. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's that's a that is a mind bending sort of
<v Speaker 1>thing to think about.
<v Speaker 2>That. Yeah, they move in real time like animals. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>the sperm moves just like an animal would or an
<v Speaker 2>animal sperm would. It's it's insane, like just oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I think I found one.
<v Speaker 1>I think I found an image. Wait, iso, I think
<v Speaker 1>that's it. What does it look like? Does it look
<v Speaker 1>like some sort of weird.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, probably yeah, probably something like that. Yeah. I don't
<v Speaker 2>remember how many tails some of these things have, but like,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, years ago, I might have seen something where
<v Speaker 2>they're like, yeah, this has like twenty tails on it.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus, it's like same jeez is, Like what what.
<v Speaker 2>Do you do with all of those different Like how
<v Speaker 2>how do you coordinate that movement at that size and
<v Speaker 2>dealing with like the what like the I don't know
<v Speaker 2>Richardson's number or whatever it is, like basically how you're
<v Speaker 2>dealing with like how water is, how viscous water is
<v Speaker 2>when you're microscopic, how water sticks to things differently at
<v Speaker 2>those sizes. I mean, it's just it's bizarre to me.
<v Speaker 1>God, I'd love to see I can't find a good
<v Speaker 1>picture of quillwarts sperm.
<v Speaker 2>Of like, yeah, this needs to happen. There needs to
<v Speaker 2>be somebody out there who's gotten under the scope and
<v Speaker 2>gotten this. I can't recall seeing like videos of it
<v Speaker 2>anywhere ever. But horsetails are draw equised them spermatozoids of equisitum.
<v Speaker 2>That looks fucking weird. Those things, I mean, those they're crazy.
<v Speaker 2>Later they h they move their God, yeah, there's.
<v Speaker 1>Spores themselves in equism because the spores themselves in equisitam
<v Speaker 1>moved too.
<v Speaker 2>Scores themselves have eas yeah, and they can and they
<v Speaker 2>move themselves. Yeah, I mean, God talk about an underappreciate
<v Speaker 2>a group of plants those are and for how much
<v Speaker 2>they're aligned, Like there's such wonderful things to.
<v Speaker 1>People have beef with them really just because they're weedy.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, well exactly, Yeah, like you know there and I mean,
<v Speaker 2>and it's it's difficult. It's it's this love hate thing.
<v Speaker 2>Like I I personally right now building up this like
<v Speaker 2>repository of like all of the horse tales of the
<v Speaker 2>world that I can get my hands on right now
<v Speaker 2>and cultivating them so that they're accessible to researchers if
<v Speaker 2>they ever need them. But it's like, I don't know,
<v Speaker 2>it takes I have to really consciously think about everything
<v Speaker 2>I'm doing around those plants in pots, Like I got
<v Speaker 2>to make sure I know where I'm situating them, how
<v Speaker 2>close are they to each other? Are these developing spores?
<v Speaker 2>You know? Like I have to really do make sure
<v Speaker 2>that they're not like setting spore and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 2>So it is it's quite a labor blood.
<v Speaker 1>And this is you're talking about.
<v Speaker 2>These are actually these are horse tales.
<v Speaker 1>I I heard a weird outside, like the fucking guy
<v Speaker 1>was mowing my neighbor was mowing my launch or my
<v Speaker 1>lack of a lawn. I ripped it all up. I
<v Speaker 1>was curious. I love it.
<v Speaker 2>Go ahead, Sorry, oh no, but that I was just thinking,
<v Speaker 2>that's that's the way you could. Yeah, if you, if
<v Speaker 2>you ever really really didn't like lawn and yeah, I
<v Speaker 2>was really gonna get back at people from all the lawns.
<v Speaker 2>It's like, just sprinkle a bunch of horsetail scores out there.
<v Speaker 2>It'll just hate it forever, and then the great pars
<v Speaker 2>it will eat up the mower head.
<v Speaker 1>Hey you are a kid man. I've seen those things
<v Speaker 1>growing in the fucking out of comm of desert like
<v Speaker 1>they were growing in a seat that they were growing
<v Speaker 1>in a really barren, really barren spot. I think it
<v Speaker 1>was equisitam giganteum or one of the other things in
<v Speaker 1>northern Chile. Yeah, and I was there was nothing around,
<v Speaker 1>it was barren, and there was just this fucking horsetail
<v Speaker 1>and like a handful of other species growing in this
<v Speaker 1>little green creek and everything else was just pink and
<v Speaker 1>the sight totally barren.
<v Speaker 2>Wow.
<v Speaker 1>Wow. Yeah, it was nuts.
<v Speaker 2>It was.
<v Speaker 1>I was really surprising.
<v Speaker 2>But it's cool there what is there?
<v Speaker 1>What's there out adaptation? The aquisinums?
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, I don't. I don't know too much about it.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, they they seem so I mean many of
<v Speaker 2>them seem so able to deal with drought once they're
<v Speaker 2>rooted deep into the ground. I mean they have such
<v Speaker 2>deep rhizomes too. That part of it probably has to
<v Speaker 2>do with that they're they have some area where they
<v Speaker 2>can pull moisture within that sort of risosphere, would be
<v Speaker 2>my guess. But there's other horsetails out there that that
<v Speaker 2>deal so like the tropical ones, like like giganteum. I
<v Speaker 2>mean you're dealing with a plant that's not seasonal, like
<v Speaker 2>it's not necessarily got seasonality to it. There are other
<v Speaker 2>horsetails that form like bowbills and things that you know,
<v Speaker 2>like some of the northern equisdems that they'll just go
<v Speaker 2>dormant for the winter. And I would imagine that in
<v Speaker 2>the past there were ones that probably could go dormant
<v Speaker 2>during dry seasons.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, like just like isolades. I mean, these are
<v Speaker 1>this is a linear is that once had huge forests
<v Speaker 1>like it was you know, members of this lineage were
<v Speaker 1>once composed huge forests. The calamities then, yeah, so do
<v Speaker 1>they have some way to seal themselves off from the atmosphere,
<v Speaker 1>like if it gets super dry.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I don't remember what their stow model regulation
<v Speaker 2>is like offhand. I mean there's some there's there's certainly
<v Speaker 2>some of these seed tree plants where the stow model
<v Speaker 2>regulations just not quite to snuff when compared to seed
<v Speaker 2>bearing plants where they can really using ebsizic acid, they
<v Speaker 2>can regulate the aperture of their stomata to release and
<v Speaker 2>release water, vapor and take in oxygen, and a lot
<v Speaker 2>of these will oftentimes have passive control their stomada more
<v Speaker 2>or less, and so they're kind of like an open pipe.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, they're bringing water up and it's just evaporating
<v Speaker 2>getting pulled by gravity out their stomata. Yeah, but horsetails
<v Speaker 2>are such such champs that probably just moving water. It's incredible.
<v Speaker 2>And they also inside them they have basically currents. As
<v Speaker 2>I thought, well, it might have been contested since but
<v Speaker 2>I remember seeing a paper a while back that there
<v Speaker 2>was high velocity winds that moved through the inner channels
<v Speaker 2>hollowed out chambers of horsetails. So they have like this
<v Speaker 2>countercurrent exchange thing going on with gases.
<v Speaker 1>I think, oh, yeah, because they're hollows. Yeah, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>there's a reason the way I see it, there's a
<v Speaker 1>reason all these lineages, you know, these old ass lineages
<v Speaker 1>have made it to the present day. You know through however,
<v Speaker 1>many mass extinctions and all the many extinctions and all this.
<v Speaker 1>It's fascinating shit to think about.
<v Speaker 2>And even more.
<v Speaker 1>Fascinating is all the stuff that you know, you've we've
<v Speaker 1>only got a few fossils of there's like you could
<v Speaker 1>get an idea of what it is, but you're not
<v Speaker 1>really sure, you know, and then all the shit that
<v Speaker 1>just never got fossilized. It's just so man, this planet's
<v Speaker 1>just been through some crazy shit.
<v Speaker 2>Like it's been hard. Yeah, it's been a rough it's
<v Speaker 2>been a rough ride for this planet.
<v Speaker 1>So with you and go ahead, Sorry, what are you
<v Speaker 1>going to say? Oh no, I'm yeah with you on
<v Speaker 1>your work with the permean, you know and these plants
<v Speaker 1>that the made it through. I guess where are you
<v Speaker 1>at right now? And what do you yeah, where do
<v Speaker 1>you want to go with that? Like what and what
<v Speaker 1>do you think? Well you'll discover? I mean, so Isoetes,
<v Speaker 1>these Isoeides relatives were thriving. What was Silaganella doing? Was
<v Speaker 1>there Selaginella around yet?
<v Speaker 2>Or what. There were slaganella around at that time too,
<v Speaker 2>and there are some of them that may have been
<v Speaker 2>doing okay, firing all right in some of these ecosystems
<v Speaker 2>alongside pleuri maya on occasion. Uh, those that were around
<v Speaker 2>may have also been desiccation plants, tolerant plants. There might
<v Speaker 2>have been some resurrection ones, I think, uh, and a
<v Speaker 2>lot of the resurrection lineages are thought, I think to
<v Speaker 2>have diverged before Gondwana broke up. So so the a
<v Speaker 2>lot of these ones we see in this that really
<v Speaker 2>have the nexus and their diversification is sent in the
<v Speaker 2>southwestern United States going into central, Central and South America.
<v Speaker 2>Really you know, they have origins that go back to
<v Speaker 2>before the continents were splitting up, and so they've been
<v Speaker 2>doing this for a while. Some of those really you know,
<v Speaker 2>primely adapted ones to the deserts. But in terms of yeah,
<v Speaker 2>basically where the work has gone and where it's going.
<v Speaker 2>When I had originally encountered a lot of these studies
<v Speaker 2>about the fossil record and the extinction, really all we
<v Speaker 2>could do was kind of come up with ideas and
<v Speaker 2>it's really the best we could do. We were just like, well,
<v Speaker 2>we see a new trend in the fossil record, Well,
<v Speaker 2>this is what must have happened, and we see a
<v Speaker 2>correlation in the geologic record. Okay, this is what probably
<v Speaker 2>did it, and this is probably how it happened. But
<v Speaker 2>that's not science. That's that's saying correlation equals causation. It's
<v Speaker 2>not the sign of method. It's not true science. So
<v Speaker 2>like as someone who was trying to go into science,
<v Speaker 2>as like, I don't really want to conduct my research
<v Speaker 2>this way. I would like to instead of drawing trend
<v Speaker 2>lines and comparing over time, I want to actually start
<v Speaker 2>testing these ideas. Because we have so many different hypotheses
<v Speaker 2>ideas for how this happened that we're never going to test,
<v Speaker 2>why don't I pick one? And so I ended up
<v Speaker 2>choosing the ozone weakening hypothesis because it just it made
<v Speaker 2>sense logically from a lot of things that was going
<v Speaker 2>on in the fossil record. And thankfully, many of these
<v Speaker 2>plant lineages that did survive the extinction, or the ones
<v Speaker 2>that did among them were Isueetes made it, you know,
<v Speaker 2>at least the Isooitalians made it and left behind cool works.
<v Speaker 2>So we have a really good analogue for and developmental
<v Speaker 2>group to work with experimentally to pleurma, which is super
<v Speaker 2>fortunate because if if I sweets was extinct, we probably
<v Speaker 2>wouldn't know what to make of those things, Like it
<v Speaker 2>would not make a lot of sense to us, I think.
<v Speaker 1>I mean when you look at them now, I mean
<v Speaker 1>you can't tell, like undoubtedly just when they're morphology like
<v Speaker 1>that these things are related.
<v Speaker 2>This is the same, right, right, But I do I
<v Speaker 2>do wonder, you know, it would be strange. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>if they if we didn't have ices modern modern wants
<v Speaker 2>to compare with, it'd be like, what what was going
<v Speaker 2>on evolutionarily with these things? And why? Why? What are
<v Speaker 2>these things? I mean, I'm sure people would come to
<v Speaker 2>the conclusion they rely like of fights, but you know
<v Speaker 2>it's kind of like, uh, I don't know, so so
<v Speaker 2>you know, there's that side and then the other side
<v Speaker 2>of this. You know, what happened to the forests was
<v Speaker 2>was very much of interest to me, and so I
<v Speaker 2>ended up basically being like, Okay, well we've got modern
<v Speaker 2>conifers that form similar types of pollen and have a
<v Speaker 2>similar life cycle to what was growing then, and we
<v Speaker 2>have the sweeties, and I basically start testing how U
<v Speaker 2>v radiation in extremely high doses, like if you obliterate
<v Speaker 2>the atmosphere, how would small forests placed under those conditions,
<v Speaker 2>you know, respond, And how would basically reproduction be affected.
<v Speaker 2>How would the development of spores and pollen be affected
<v Speaker 2>between lycophytes and you know, these seed plants, and so
<v Speaker 2>you know, I originally I took a look at the
<v Speaker 2>forests and was doing research on basically Mugo pine, just
<v Speaker 2>Pinus mugo, basically the alpine pine from Europe that's really
<v Speaker 2>common in a lot of northern gardens as a horticultural writing.
<v Speaker 2>And then I stuck those under basically atmospheres where or
<v Speaker 2>like into environmental chambers under these lamps that basically simulated
<v Speaker 2>something like you know, if you knocked out the ozone
<v Speaker 2>layer almost and you know, variable of you b and
<v Speaker 2>growing them for just a season under that, We found
<v Speaker 2>that the same types of malformations we've seen the fossil
<v Speaker 2>record are produced in these modern modern pines. And then
<v Speaker 2>what was really weird though, was that while the pollen
<v Speaker 2>is wacky, and we kind of thinking originally that well,
<v Speaker 2>seems like mutated pollen would not be a good thing
<v Speaker 2>for reproduction because your sperm probably wouldn't be swimming and
<v Speaker 2>wouldn't be doing so well. Well if it was a
<v Speaker 2>conifer that was German like pollen it that way. Most
<v Speaker 2>of them are not. They have pollen t nation tubes.
<v Speaker 2>And then we realized that all of the seed cones
<v Speaker 2>were killed on every single tree under every single permian
<v Speaker 2>UV simulation, like even the lowest one. The trees gave
<v Speaker 2>up reproduction entirely. They just sterilized the forests.
<v Speaker 1>So that's why they stopped appearing in the fossil record.
<v Speaker 1>That's why they went out probably, or it could be
<v Speaker 1>it could be one of the yeah, yeah, and that
<v Speaker 1>was yeah, just where do you get the UV lights?
<v Speaker 1>I mean they're just UV lamps that are super.
<v Speaker 2>Strong or what super strong UV lamps? So we got
<v Speaker 2>these Xeon arc lamps from this company in Whales and
<v Speaker 2>had them shipped over and then we had a custom
<v Speaker 2>radiometer that was designed for detecting UVB specific like wavelengths
<v Speaker 2>as well, which was Yeah, it was quite an ordeal
<v Speaker 2>to get those lamps.
<v Speaker 1>What do they make those lamps for? Like, what are
<v Speaker 1>they made for?
<v Speaker 2>A lot of times they use them, so they use
<v Speaker 2>ones that are nastier, so that emit UVC as sterilization
<v Speaker 2>lamps like in chemical like in UH in flow hoods
<v Speaker 2>or no in fume hoods basically, so you could sterilize
<v Speaker 2>your your cultures of like microbes and stuff for extinctions.
<v Speaker 2>So they'll have kill lamps and they'll have other ones
<v Speaker 2>that are not as intents that are you know, using
<v Speaker 2>UVA radiation that are used for are basically like checking
<v Speaker 2>currency and things like that, and you know governmental uses
<v Speaker 2>and like t s A and stuff like that, I guess,
<v Speaker 2>But and then you have these UVB levels that are
<v Speaker 2>reason we had to kind of finagle things like in
<v Speaker 2>terms of get everything custom was that v B had
<v Speaker 2>less of a there's less of a market for it
<v Speaker 2>because it's kind of like, well, it mutates things, but
<v Speaker 2>it's not like fully deadly, so we don't use it
<v Speaker 2>for a kill lamp. But it's pretty deleterious and it
<v Speaker 2>will kill you know, slowly. But yeah, some of these lamps,
<v Speaker 2>like we used to I used to do experiments with
<v Speaker 2>like daphnia, these little relatives of fairy shrimp and UH
<v Speaker 2>and trups with a grad student who was looking at
<v Speaker 2>EUV effects on and sometimes they'd be dead in like
<v Speaker 2>five minutes under one of these lamps. Like it's nasty.
<v Speaker 1>There's the sun, there's the sun. Emit uv C or
<v Speaker 1>just uv A and v B or does UVC get
<v Speaker 1>blocked by the.
<v Speaker 2>Atmosphere, Yeah, you're correct and saying it gets blocked by
<v Speaker 2>the atmosphere. Yeah, so it does get produced by on,
<v Speaker 2>but it's blocked by the fact there's any oxygen in
<v Speaker 2>the atmosphere, and particularly ozone. Usually you won't get UVC
<v Speaker 2>hitting or surfaced, but you know, and and so so yeah,
<v Speaker 2>uv B is gonna be with with an ozone hole.
<v Speaker 2>Usually UVB is the one you're going to worry about.
<v Speaker 2>There might be very minute traces of UVC that can
<v Speaker 2>get through, but it's not I don't think it's it's
<v Speaker 2>usually like you know, cause for absolute panic and warms.
<v Speaker 1>So like you, UVA is like a black light flashlight
<v Speaker 1>you used to look at scorpions. Uv be's a little
<v Speaker 1>bit stronger, shorter wavelength than than uvcs, like the nastier
<v Speaker 1>uv really yeah wavelength compared to.
<v Speaker 2>The really short lavelength stuff. Yeah, exactly, and so yeah
<v Speaker 2>that be that b whay. You know, the wavelengths within
<v Speaker 2>uv B spectrum are enough to get the plants to
<v Speaker 2>basically just give up on reproduction entire and it's it
<v Speaker 2>was so weird because every one of these populations of
<v Speaker 2>trees looked super healthy, like really happy little potted trees
<v Speaker 2>like conifers, and you'd never think they were stuck under
<v Speaker 2>like blasted with v radiation for like half a year. Wow.
<v Speaker 1>So they didn't they didn't display they didn't display any
<v Speaker 1>other like negative phrase from just aborting. Yeah, that was it.
<v Speaker 2>That was the only sign aside from the pollen was
<v Speaker 2>was getting wacky. So they were kicking out a lot
<v Speaker 2>more malformed pollen, like significantly more than they normally would.
<v Speaker 1>Was it the clumping like the isohedes fossils or was
<v Speaker 1>it just weird looking pollen like mutated pollen.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was more often the sort of weird looking poem.
<v Speaker 2>And and you know where basically in pines and a
<v Speaker 2>lot of these conifers that were back you know in
<v Speaker 2>the Permian they had pollen that was called sack eate pollen.
<v Speaker 2>So they basically the pollen two little air bladders on it,
<v Speaker 2>and I mean it really looks like a little Mickey
<v Speaker 2>mouse head in a way like in Silhouette. They're they're
<v Speaker 2>cute little things. But uh, you know, these these weird
<v Speaker 2>little air bladders, the sac guy would sometimes be produced.
<v Speaker 2>You know, there'd be more than two of them, there'd
<v Speaker 2>be like maybe three or four, you know, five, and
<v Speaker 2>sometimes they'd be twisted or enveloping the pollen grains so
<v Speaker 2>it couldn't crack open to Germany, so you had just
<v Speaker 2>and then you'd have misshapen ones or ones where the
<v Speaker 2>sack guy were really small in size or really large.
<v Speaker 2>So it's kind of a whole gamut of variation in form.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, we we subsequently actually went through and
<v Speaker 2>basically after this experiment, we wanted to find out okay,
<v Speaker 2>well we see we proposed at this point that hey,
<v Speaker 2>you know, you could have had the largest mass extinction
<v Speaker 2>Aariy's history happen without anti kill mechanism if this was around,
<v Speaker 2>Because all you'd need to do is basically just screw
<v Speaker 2>up meiosis or you know, of the seeds or the
<v Speaker 2>ovules of the dominant tree lineages across the planet, and
<v Speaker 2>your entire food web collapses really quick. Yeah. Act, it
<v Speaker 2>wouldn't take many forest collapses on that scale to knock
<v Speaker 2>out a lot of the animal lineages. I think and
<v Speaker 2>the plants just keep going through this. So like the plants,
<v Speaker 2>and that was the other thing was really fascinating about
<v Speaker 2>just this experiment, Like we had no idea we would
<v Speaker 2>see something like that. That was a total Like I
<v Speaker 2>remember the day that I started noticing these mummy cones,
<v Speaker 2>like these little shriveled, mummified little cones coming out. Basically,
<v Speaker 2>these little seed cones would emerge and at about three
<v Speaker 2>or so millimeters in diameter, they would just shrivel up
<v Speaker 2>and turn black. And there were some of these cones
<v Speaker 2>and some branches these conifers would ooze out resin over
<v Speaker 2>their cones, healing it like sealing it like it's a
<v Speaker 2>wound and tuning it.
<v Speaker 1>But otherwise growing, Yeah, otherwise looking fine. That's so weird.
<v Speaker 1>So so basically, and you can see how if this
<v Speaker 1>lasted for as long as it did, and the premium,
<v Speaker 1>like you said, lasted pretty long, eventually stuff just stops
<v Speaker 1>reproducing and just starts disappearing from the landscape. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you halt your succession and you got a point
<v Speaker 2>where you have you know, it really becomes a Children
<v Speaker 2>of Men scenario where you just get you stop reproduction
<v Speaker 2>and suddenly you're facing a real crisis suddenly.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I haven't seen that at Yes, it's.
<v Speaker 2>A great movie, but you know, when I watched it,
<v Speaker 2>I was like so creeped out, and I was like,
<v Speaker 2>oh my god, this is having so many parils what
<v Speaker 2>I've been seeing in the lab. But like with with
<v Speaker 2>a plant level or a plant sort of you know,
<v Speaker 2>emphasis of it, and it's like, you know, it really
<v Speaker 2>is disturbing that you you could I mean we we
<v Speaker 2>sort of proposed at the end of our first paper
<v Speaker 2>on this that you could probably be just taking a
<v Speaker 2>stroll through a in Permian forest and you wouldn't know
<v Speaker 2>anything was wrong, and you might be like, right as
<v Speaker 2>things are getting bad, it's just that the forests are,
<v Speaker 2>you know, they're kind of stuck. Like the older trees
<v Speaker 2>are just keep living, but they wouldn't be reproducing anymore.
<v Speaker 2>And if you kept having this for thousands of years
<v Speaker 2>on replay, I mean even your most like ra calcic
<v Speaker 2>trees are going to get trialed, like they're not going
<v Speaker 2>to be doing well.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and then and like you said, like the cascade
<v Speaker 1>of effects then too, because everything that depends on them
<v Speaker 1>is just suddenly there's there's no tree cover anymore, there's
<v Speaker 1>no you know, who knows that the ecological relationships of
<v Speaker 1>those lamps life, but all of a sudden the animals start.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's just nuts to think about that. So
<v Speaker 1>why did isoes? Why do these isoez relatives like plurimea
<v Speaker 1>and analypus, why did they what do you what do
<v Speaker 1>you hypothesize? Why did they make it through? Why were
<v Speaker 1>they inaffected?
<v Speaker 2>Well, I mean there's there's a couple ideas. We're in
<v Speaker 2>the midst right now of trying to figure that out
<v Speaker 2>right now with a series of experiens that we've been
<v Speaker 2>doing over the past few years. And I mean it's
<v Speaker 2>really yeah, I think what the culmination of a lot
<v Speaker 2>of work that's been done and a lot of people
<v Speaker 2>thinking about it today prior to I mean, the things
<v Speaker 2>that we're working on in the lab right now behind
<v Speaker 2>the scenes seem to be that there's certainly this stress
<v Speaker 2>tolerating extremophilic ability in these plants. So they're able to
<v Speaker 2>they're able to take whatever.
<v Speaker 3>They're hit with.
<v Speaker 2>In this environment, and they seem to be able to
<v Speaker 2>either they're able to survive it. The sort of hypothesis
<v Speaker 2>that we had proposed at least in our first work
<v Speaker 2>on the forest collapses, is that really all you need
<v Speaker 2>I sweets to probably do in theory would be they'd
<v Speaker 2>be doing better than conifers in trees if they could
<v Speaker 2>actually reproduce under those same conditions that sterilize the tree lineages,
<v Speaker 2>and they you know, and then you know, everything else
<v Speaker 2>kind of doesn't even matter. Almost like they can survived
<v Speaker 2>long enough and they can persist to reproduce, they might
<v Speaker 2>be okay. And so we've been doing experiments to try
<v Speaker 2>and test whether that happens and whether we can we
<v Speaker 2>can get those kind of signals. But you know, it's
<v Speaker 2>it's a it's complicated though. I mean, it's these sorts
<v Speaker 2>of experiments we've been doing. I mean, while the you know,
<v Speaker 2>we're we're really close to i think public trying to
<v Speaker 2>at least submit our first paper into publication about you know,
<v Speaker 2>what happened on the ICBD side of it in terms
<v Speaker 2>of you know, reveals and things. But it seems like
<v Speaker 2>to me that the way we've looked at mass extinctions
<v Speaker 2>for so long seems so shaped by like biblical like culture,
<v Speaker 2>like the way we look at how things die, like
<v Speaker 2>even uniformitarianism, like well, just some of the basic geological
<v Speaker 2>sort of under pittings from early in the development of
<v Speaker 2>field of geology really had to have been influenced by
<v Speaker 2>you know, like just our thought of the church and
<v Speaker 2>how we think things happen and how there's armageddon and extinction.
<v Speaker 2>Biology kind of goes into that area. We we kind
<v Speaker 2>of think of the world goes to hell in a
<v Speaker 2>hand bask and it's kind of judgment day. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>and I almost feel like it's it's great that we
<v Speaker 2>we are working on things, like you know, there's there's
<v Speaker 2>people working on the asteroid impact and we talk about them.
<v Speaker 2>We've we've made that more accessible to the public. But
<v Speaker 2>there's also this double ended sword that you know, like
<v Speaker 2>the popularization of when the asteroid impact was discovered, you know,
<v Speaker 2>as as a potential leading driver and the dinosaur extinction,
<v Speaker 2>it suddenly made the whole view. I think of a
<v Speaker 2>lot of these extinctions as oh, this could be like
<v Speaker 2>this holocaust that happens overnight and everything dies, right, that
<v Speaker 2>sort of idea though, like, well, it does play out
<v Speaker 2>on you know, on ecosystem levels, and we see it
<v Speaker 2>certainly today in places where you have mass mortality of
<v Speaker 2>some things to disease or a freak climate event. At
<v Speaker 2>the other end of the spectrum, it's like you you
<v Speaker 2>pan out and some of these events like the Permian
<v Speaker 2>are happened over millions of years.
<v Speaker 1>Right, It's not as simple. It's not as simple as
<v Speaker 1>overnight end game. Yeah, yeah, the apocalypse. I could see
<v Speaker 1>that it taints the view, you know, Oh, it's got
<v Speaker 1>to be this way. When I was like, no, you
<v Speaker 1>got to zoom out, you got to think of it
<v Speaker 1>a little differently.
<v Speaker 2>You know, it's so true and and yeah, and when
<v Speaker 2>you look at sign of papers that come out to
<v Speaker 2>this date, I think the troubling part for me from
<v Speaker 2>sort of the botanical nerdy perspective is that, well, you know,
<v Speaker 2>when people who are looking at the extinction, they're looking
<v Speaker 2>for the smoking gun. They want to find what was
<v Speaker 2>the bullet that shot life in the face and killed it,
<v Speaker 2>And it's like they're looking for the kill mechanism. And
<v Speaker 2>you know, immediately when we started seeing these sterilized for us,
<v Speaker 2>I was like, we're probably looking at the wrong thing
<v Speaker 2>this whole time, Like this is probably not how this happens.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, part of that was kind of going
<v Speaker 2>back to like just what I was learning in undergraduate
<v Speaker 2>like an introductory biology class. I think it has to
<v Speaker 2>lay it out as straightforward to students than anywhere I
<v Speaker 2>had experienced it elsewhere, like as a scientist, And I
<v Speaker 2>still remember lectures of my biology teachers saying, you know,
<v Speaker 2>like when we talk about evolution, we talk about natural selection,
<v Speaker 2>we're not talking about you know, and we're talking about
<v Speaker 2>like fitness, right. You know a lot of people will
<v Speaker 2>say fitness is that Well, we construed it as like
<v Speaker 2>in our our way that fitness something is strong, like
<v Speaker 2>it's it's fit. But the biological term for fitness is
<v Speaker 2>being able to maintain your reproductive capacity over a long
<v Speaker 2>period of time and having a greater reproductive capacity over
<v Speaker 2>time to pass on genes, to pass on generations and
<v Speaker 2>continue a lineage over time.
<v Speaker 1>Right, And the quality of fitness too is dependent. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's different for every environment. Well, like when I am
<v Speaker 1>telling people about this stuff, what might be what might
<v Speaker 1>convey fitness in a desert environment is going to be
<v Speaker 1>completely antagonistic and maladaptive in a swamp environment. You know,
<v Speaker 1>having hairs on your leaves is beneficial in a desert.
<v Speaker 1>In a swamp, your leaves are going to rot, you know.
<v Speaker 1>So it's it's totally the environment decides what is fit,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and that's that according to the list of
<v Speaker 1>character character traits in that environment, and that's different for
<v Speaker 1>every environment. So it sounds like the permean what was
<v Speaker 1>going on. Mean, yeah, there was a suite of really
<v Speaker 1>fucked up circumstances that were going on, and it was
<v Speaker 1>just that you know, that's selected for only a handful
<v Speaker 1>of things making it through, you know, acting acting like
<v Speaker 1>a filter and deciding what gets to what gets to
<v Speaker 1>continue existing, and what goes extinct. But I definitely think
<v Speaker 1>that the UV thing is pretty cool because a lot
<v Speaker 1>of people don't associate, you know, the loss of the
<v Speaker 1>ozone layer with extinction events. I mean, a lot of
<v Speaker 1>people don't even know what CO two is linked to
<v Speaker 1>a lot of extinction events, you know, a rise in
<v Speaker 1>CO two or a drastic decrease in CO two. But
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, man, the Permian I mean, it's it's yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's one of those I remember when I first learned
<v Speaker 1>about it, the couple, I must have been twenty or something,
<v Speaker 1>and I was just it was it's it's enigmatic, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's really mysterious. It's it's a cool thing to think about.
<v Speaker 1>And so this group of plants thriving, it's fucking wild,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like why.
<v Speaker 2>It's really weird. Yeah, and it really was. I mean
<v Speaker 2>for me it was the gate my gateway into this
<v Speaker 2>extinction and studying it was just like, well why, likea
<v Speaker 2>fights and you know, that simple question sort of like
<v Speaker 2>took me down this path of like the entire eco systems.
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, it became so much bigger than that too.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, I mean it really this is one of
<v Speaker 2>those instances and in the history of life where you know,
<v Speaker 2>knowing an obscure group of plants actually makes a huge
<v Speaker 2>difference in understanding how you know, the entire biosphere almost
<v Speaker 2>came to its knees.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I got to ask, did you guys blast iso
<v Speaker 1>etes with UVB with those UVB lamps yet?
<v Speaker 2>Did you have Yeah, we have done it.
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to give away. I don't want to
<v Speaker 1>go I.
<v Speaker 2>Won't give away the results. But we're you know, we
<v Speaker 2>we're in the process of we've got a paper and
<v Speaker 2>prep right now that we're hoping to submit soon. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's going to be weird, but.
<v Speaker 1>Let me know when it comes out, man, because I
<v Speaker 1>want to Yeah, I want to share that. That's really cool.
<v Speaker 1>I'm really curious what you find, so absolutely happy to
<v Speaker 1>do so yeah, man, well thanks for being down to
<v Speaker 1>do this. Uh we just did two and a half hours.
<v Speaker 1>It's awesome. So I appreciate that I could talk to
<v Speaker 1>you for another three man, because I know you're into
<v Speaker 1>conifers and all that shit was what got me in
<v Speaker 1>the bond and the first place, just thinking about these
<v Speaker 1>past time periods and how different they were, and just
<v Speaker 1>how fucking weird things looked. I mean, not even thinking
<v Speaker 1>about the animals that were alive back then, you know,
<v Speaker 1>just those forests just looked so cool, even if you're
<v Speaker 1>looking at like I forget the name of the the
<v Speaker 1>guy who's well known, he's dead, but he's a painter
<v Speaker 1>who was always painting these weird landscapes with dinosaurs in
<v Speaker 1>him and the trees he would always put in the background.
<v Speaker 1>I just remember, like, you know, oh God, look at him,
<v Speaker 1>just being like what the fuck? But all based on
<v Speaker 1>actual fossils, you know, known fossils.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah they are. It's it's absolutely wild. And actually
<v Speaker 2>today I was us on social media and saw a
<v Speaker 2>picture that just blew my mind of an aracaria I
<v Speaker 2>think somewhere and may have been somewhere in Brazil, but
<v Speaker 2>it had an entire lawn of red cataleia orchids, just
<v Speaker 2>distuning the entire trunk going blood red cataleas on an
<v Speaker 2>our car. And I thought it was such a beautiful
<v Speaker 2>image of how life has changed so much with time,
<v Speaker 2>but in some ways not so much.
<v Speaker 1>So they're still with us, Eric carry Is Man especially. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's like a whole accat I could. I'm a right,
<v Speaker 1>I gotta stand myself because I'll drag this podcast half hour.
<v Speaker 1>All right, Jeff Banker, thanks so much, man, I appreciate it.
<v Speaker 1>And where can people, uh, you know, learn more about
<v Speaker 1>your work. You got a website or just you got
<v Speaker 1>a couple of papers out right?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I got it. I got a couple of papers
<v Speaker 2>out yeah. So some of those are on like Google,
<v Speaker 2>scholar research Gate, those sorts of places. And then yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and I often am posting all sorts of weird plants
<v Speaker 2>that I'm growing and backing up and researching on social.
<v Speaker 1>Media, so Instagram or Facebook or what I do it
<v Speaker 1>on both.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, so just by my name, you know, Jeff
<v Speaker 2>Banker on there, and yeah, there they're there. So if
<v Speaker 2>you like a lot of weird Lika fights and conifers
<v Speaker 2>and strange things, I've always got some strange stuff up there.
<v Speaker 1>Cool many. I'll share your Instagram page in the in
<v Speaker 1>the podcast details. So man, thanks again for coming on.
<v Speaker 1>I appreciate it anytime. Thanks so much, Joe, it's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of fun talking about this. Yeah, you too, Man.
<v Speaker 1>All right, everybody else go find us up by Jeff.
<v Speaker 1>Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Take care, take care, right,