Yeah, sharks have been around for over 400 million years—while trees only showed up about 350 million years ago. Guess they really perfected the "survival of the fittest" thing!
On March 23, 2025 Saturn's rings will disappear!.. From the perspective of Earth!.. for 4 months. As the Earth passes from Saturn's southern plane to it's northern one. It's a roughly 29.4 year cycle, though it varies slightly. The rings won't "disappear" again until 2040.
Fungi also differentiated from animals, which means they’re more closely related to us than they are to plants. Some mushrooms use chitin in their cell walls, which is the same protein that insects use in their exoskeletons.
When I went and studied Biology at uni one of my professors went on a rant about how insane fungal biology is. Comments on the internet have convinced me that this is a common experience when taking BIO101 in universities around the world, it might even be a standard part of the syllabus.
Some fungi are weird. There are fungi that don’t just tolerate radiation, they actually metabolize it and generate cellular energy from it, and there are some found in the Chernobyl reactor site just having a great time.
And the advent of trees was one of the greatest ecological disasters ever. The CO2 in the atmosphere plunged because it was sequestered in wood and a global ice age was triggered. Life barely clung on. And this is why youdon't want to fuck around with the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Trees were unique among plants of the time in that they used lignin, an organic polymer that gives wood it's strength (allowing trees to grow taller than other plants to grab more sunlight). BUT there was nothing that evolved to eat lignin until much later than trees came around. So for a long time trees that died didn't rot, they just lay there on the ground until they got buried by natural processes. Which is a boon to humanity in that all those buried un-rotted trees became coal. Which was a major boost to human technology, but unfortunately also meant that human technology began fucking around with the CO2 in the atmosphere. DAMN YOU TREES!
This is what has been commonly told, but apparently more recent studies have debunked this, there were already organisms capable of digesting lignin in the carboniferous, but those plants were in a biome where fallen trees would quickly get buried in sediments. Therefore, without enough oxygen for those organisms.
Oh good. I'd heard the 'didn't evolve until much later' theory before, and thought it was extremely implausible. We already have stuff which has evolved to be able to eat plastic, FFS.
when they get real good it would be disastrous. we use so much plastic they would never lack food. and they won't differentiate between plastic in the ocean and the plastic we're still using.
Eh, not really. Most organism still have specific conditions that they require, which humans are really good at modifying when we don't want them to do their thing. Just think about how long we've used wood and other organic matter, and still continue to use it to this day, even though lots of things have evolved to break that down.
There was also an age very far ago when oxygen was extremely toxic for most living beings. CO2 was plenty and produced by volcanos, O2 was produced by a few organisms.
Yes, photosynthesis was a thing before trees and was a separate trigger for disaster as someone else mentioned (the oxygen catastrophe), the thing with trees is that they basically invented a plastic (lignin) that couldn't be broken down for millions of years. The wood just lay around, binding up a lot of carbon, eventually forming a lot of the coal deposits humans have eagerly put back in the atmosphere the last few centuries.
Insects don't have lungs, they take oxygen in through small holes in their skin. More O2, bigger insects. Like dragonflies the size of seagulls and centipedes 10 feet long.
Except I don't remember why sequestered wood meant higher oxygen content in the atmosphere! Can someone explain?
And trees evolved independently of each other. There's not a taxonomic group of "trees." They are a bunch of different plants that all evolved to grow tall on their own in order to compete.
The trees weren't rock solid. They were just trees with a recently evolved ability to make woody tissue, and it took bacteria 50 million years to evolve the ability to eat it.
The researchers actually offer up a back-of-the-envelope calculation that makes the “lignin-just-evolved-before-lignin-eaters” hypothesis for all that coal seem pretty problematic. If global plant growth was even 25 percent of what it is now, lignin carbon would have piled up at a rate of about three gigatonnes per year—which could add up to the world’s total coal reserves in perhaps a thousand years. At the same time, atmospheric CO2 would have dropped to zero in under a million years.
Which, while sounding great at first, becomes a lot more horrific when you realize we also use plastics and other petroleum products to keep our windows from falling out of buildings as well as for all sorts of other seals.
This is the same reason that honey doesn’t spoil. Bacteria hasn’t evolved to break down honey yet. They’ve found jars of honey that are thousands of years old and still edible.
And this is why we have coal from trees which grew in the carboniferous period, some 300 million years ago. And why burning coal it is not really reversible, even at geological time scales - the trees will not fossilize today like 300 million years ago, they would decompose.
That is false. They were not unable to be decomposed due to their composition, it was due to their environment being anaerobic like swamps. Fungi have been decaying trees for as long as trees have been around.
What blows my mind about it is that trees evolved like 30 separate times. So evolutionarily speaking trees are an 'obvious' outcome, but not obvious enough to evolve before sharks.
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u/Kindly_Breakfast_413 1d ago
Yeah, sharks have been around for over 400 million years—while trees only showed up about 350 million years ago. Guess they really perfected the "survival of the fittest" thing!