botanyshitposts:

i keep getting asks asking me to explain hornworts and i just cant seem to decide on a good way to explain them. theyre just….weird on so many levels, but the weirdness increases as the level of scientific context increases. like: 

level 0 hornwort: hornworts are weird bc theyre small plants related to mosses that sometimes can be found chilling around streams and stuff

level 1 hornwort: hornworts are weird bc they have little pores all over them filled with mucus that they invite bacteria to live in. sometimes these are literally referred to as ‘slime pores’

level 2 hornwort: hornworts are weird bc their spore organs are tube-shaped, stand upright from a base, and are constantly growing and peeling back to disperse more spores

level 10 hornwort: hornworts are weird bc they all have exactly one (1) singular chloroplast per cell. this is normal for algae, but most land plants have multiple chloroplasts per cell in varying amounts? like nobody else is out there like ‘u may only have ONE EACH’?

level 50 hornwort: hornworts are weird bc their spore organs are photosynthetic and also have two copies of chromosomes per cell (diploid)…..like mosses have spore organs like that too but they’re not photosynthetic so its like……man……what other photosynthetic things do we know of that have two copies of chromosomes per cell, grow weird tubes that stand upright from a base, and spit babies from the ends?

level 100 hornwort: hornworts are weird bc they’re they closest living evolutionary link we have between moss-like-plants and literally all other plants

level 200 hornwort: modern hornwort on the left, first known vascular land plants as described from 400 million year old fossils on the right