#Lepidodendrons

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 62: early Modern and Much Earlier

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct grouping.

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration.

I can't remember if we did this one. It would have been late last summer. i think we did some specific species, but i can't remember if it was done in total. I am quoting the whole suggestion here: "Carboniferous forests, before Angiosperms became dominant. I want to see the lepidodendrons and the huge equisetes and all the many Araucaria and gnetophytes and ginkgos that once thrived."

It is too late to fix the typo, but the First item should read somemething like: "People, species, and landscapes of California circa 1400.

[kiabugboy]

Another carboniferous painting, going for something more stylized this time

[vickysaurus]

(Image, as well as much of my information, from Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction by George R. McGhee Jr.)

Take a look at this tree. On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird do you think it is?

You quite possibly just gave it a 3 or a 4 or something. Sure, it's a little odd, but does look vaguely normal, right? A friend of mine guessed it was some sort of baobab when I showed him the image.

This is, in fact Lepidodendron, an ancient tree from the Carboniferous, and by modern tree standards it is absolutely bizarre. Its closest surviving relatives, quillworts and clubmosses, only grow to a height of a few centimetres, yet Lepidodendron were giants that shot up to 50 metres tall... Briefly, before dispersing their spores and completely dying off.

(Lycopodium and Spinulum, modern relatives of Lepidodendron, photos by Bernd Haynold and Pete Pattavina)

You see, Lepidondron lived like a gigantic dandelion. For most of its life, it was a stumpy little thing that stuck close to the ground. Just an odd scaly green stump with some long leaves poking out. The green scales its bark consisted of were the place it conducted its photosynthesis, and thus basically did the work of leaves. The Lepidodendron would stay like this for a couple years, slowly expanding its roots and getting ready for the next step. But its roots would grow mostly horizontally, down not so much! And part of why is that even they had the scaly leaf-like photosynthetic bark. That's right, even their roots could - and to some extend needed to - photosynthesise!

(Fossil Lepidodendron bark in the National Museum of Brazil, photo by Dornicke; a fossilised relative of Lepidodendron with some of its roots visible, photo by Michael C. Rygel)

So why would you ever try to photosynthesise with your roots of all things as a plant? Surely it would make much more sense to just transport the sugars created in other parts there than to have your roots be so shallow that bits of them can catch a little light and make it in situ? Sure, if you're capable of that! This is what modern trees do, but they have two separate vascular tissues they use for transport: xylem, which moves water from the roots to the rest of the plant, and phloem, which moves sugars and other photosynthetic products from the leaves to the rest of the plant. Unfortunately for Lepidodendron, it only had xylem, no phloem, so its sugars were only ever going to move as far as they could diffuse, so every part of the tree needed to have at least a little photosynthesis happening, even the roots.

This truly gets ridiculous when the Lepidodendron decides after a few years of charging up that it's time to reproduce. That's when the weird green stump we have so far starts shooting up, up, up, very quickly, all the way until an enormous 40 or 50 metres in height. Now, modern trees grow this large by being supported by a sturdy wooden core, but that's not what Lepidodendron did. To hold up the entire tree, it relies entirely on its outer bark thickening as it grows. In mechanical terms, it was little more than a huge hollow pole, probably creaking and swaying terribly in the wind. Although I have not been able to confirm this in the literature so far, I suspect that between the shallow roots and the whole thing being held up by its bark, you could probably total a Lepidodendron with a good kick.

Now remember, all this growth is happening without phloem, so the entire length of that stem has to not just be sturdy enough to keep the tree standing, but it also has to keep doing photosynthesis to feed itself. When it reaches its full height, the top of the tree finally starts sprouting branches and small leaves, leaving it looking like the picture at the start. But those are not what it's all about for the tree: the cones that develop among them are. At a height of 50 metres, the spores produced by the cones can very easily be picked up by the wind and blown far, far away. Being spores, rather than seeds as modern trees have, they have no supplies built in whatsoever, so they need to get lucky to land in a spot that has immediate access to water. Luckily, there are a lot of those in the vast Carboniferous swamps, and with the trees doing so much work to spread the spores very widely, some of them are sure to find good spots. And then, with the spores dispersed, the tree is done for. The entire thing, which has just grown to the skies, dies off and soon comes crashing down.

So how weird is this tree? I'd call it a perfect 10.

[housecow]

How come the Palaeozoic era has so many weird little dudes?

well, it was the first time life got to try out all of its fucked up little tricks.. and then the permian extinction took them all out :(( life would be so much better if trilobites were still around i think

but fr. it was the first era with recognizable macro-organisms. life was suddenly flourishing and was trying out bunch of stuff. think of it this way: without the paleozoic and its experiments, life as we know it today wouldn’t exist.

so you better thank those godless fish from the devonian for developing jaws and bones ❤️

[quetzii]

remain calm

[vickysaurus-art]

On a moonlit night in the early Carboniferous, two Pulmonoscorpius do a mating dance in the Lepidodendron swamp. Although the giant scorpions have little interest in prey right now, a Balanerpeton amphibian wisely decides to swim away, while several Casineria sleep through the night in the copious tree litter.

[encorific]

stupid extinct tree trend thing

[ellieanimations113]

Funny thing I made

[tbhcollector]

Wuhoh Larry!! Better high-tail it outta there!!!

[earlypalaeoart]

'Restored aspect of Carboniferous flora' from the Upper Silurian or Passage Beds of Lanarkshire’ from The past and present life of the globe. Being a sketch in outline of the world’s life-system by David Page, 1861

https://archive.org/details/pastpresentlifeo00pagerich/page/104/mode/1up

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 38: Pre-History Continued

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct earlier time grouping. Basically, I'd already moved on to human history, but I'd periodically get a pre-homin suggestion, hence the occasional random item waaay out of it's time period, rather than reopen the category.

In some cases a culture lasted a really long time and I grouped them by whether it was likely the later or earlier grouping made the most sense with the information I had. (Invention ofs tend to fall in an earlier grouping if it's still open. Ones that imply height of or just before something tend to get grouped later, but not always. Sometimes I'll split two different things from the same culture into different polls because they involve separate research goals or the like).

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration. All cultures and time periods welcome.

[mark-demolition]

Hehe lepidodendron

Malay version:

No text version

Uhh Hehe haha silly me

[jarchivism]

I drew this way back in november during an aggie.io. Not sure why I found it so funny.

[mixotrophics]

lepidodendron fossils (root impressions,, the holes are vertical roots and the long shallow textured trough is a horizontal root)

There are lots of lycopods nearby, many herbariums have lycopod samples that go back centuries, with DNA that can be used in next gen sequencing …

I like to think the lycopods and the fossils are sitting there together like when you go to a graveyard and wonder if anyone there is a distant distant ancestor of yours

Basalt of an old volcano chamber and the conduit extending out of it. Similar to columnar basalt hexagon time but radial due to the round chamber !

Rough timeline:

Volcano is probably Devonian, most igneous rock here is,

Equatorial swamp in Carboniferous -> lepidodendron and extensive coal veins. Cool sedimentary rock too, with visible effects of tidal deposition,

From then on drift to higher latitudes. And other new places.

[ssspork]

Pheonix would get caught in a tear in the fabric in time I think