On the flip side, if you could time travel to that epoch, the ground would be extremely comfy for your feet.
yesterday someone posted a closeup of moss on a street to show how fascinating it is. i can’t find it anymore, but it was cool. maybe somebody still has that picture?
Edit:
Oh I feel special, that was me!
That is also not a moss. It is actually a flowering plant in the euphorbia family. It is related to poinsettias, rubber trees, crotons and milk tree cactuses.
If you wanted to look at other cool plant photos I’ve taken I post on iNaturalist a lot. Here’s one of some wild lettuce: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/239182317
Go to Iceland and there are huge fields of lava rocks covered in a thick yellow-greenish moss because there isn’t enough soil for anything else to grow. It is surreal and probably what most of the earth looked like for those 40 million years
Yes. Seconding and insisting you drive to this restaurant in the Westfjords. I hated seafood until I went here and it broke me. I now love seafood.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g189967-d1099110-Reviews-Tjoruhusid-Isafjordur_Westfjords_Region.html 5.0 at almost 900 reviews for a reason. It’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, literally hours and hours to get here.
Also !mosses@mander.xyz
You’re thinking about this like it’s just a single uniform endless pasture of gray-green moss. But you have to recognize all the moss is competing for space and resources.
So you’ve got 40M years of different kinds of mosses all developing novel evolutionary strategies as they try to one up one another. Just a rainforest of mosses, with an uncountable variation of shapes and colors and compositions.
Moss bushes. Moss trees. Hanging mosses. Floating mosses. Dense spongey moss. Brilliantly colored moss. Poisoned moss. Cannibal moss. Stinging moss. Velvety moss. Venus Fly Moss. Moss of a thousand different color variants.
And every few hundred years, you get a new moss meta strategy for being the best kind of moss that pushes all the other moss out. Played across 40M years, it’s this big squirling fractual of warring moss tribes, until finally another organism figures out the optimal play on all moss and then it’s over as fast as it started.
Fortunately, there was no thinking until a very long time after that.
Well, not by life indigenous to Earth, anyway.
mmmm oil, or gas, or coal, whatever the moss ended up doing, it was something.
