The wonderful world of weird plant features ~ Archive

Art articles, EnvironmentsLeave a comment

The wonderful world of weird plant features. Here we are, the conclusion and archive of those support articles. As you might already know, those articles describe wonderful adaptations in the plant world. Over the many years of evolution, cultivation, and documentation some strange things popped up. Some more than others.
Other than a fun read, this archive and the connected articles are meant to inspire artists and world builders and expand their scope of knowledge. Those examples are just a small collection of what goes on in our world, but it’s enough to make you as artists become aware and start discovering on your own.
Our world is full of the wonderful and remarkable. Many things of that most people are not even aware of. But because they exist in our world, they can be a really nice place to start when building creatures or worlds.

Weird features of the plant kingdom – Part 1

Living species, Science and evolutionLeave a comment

If you thought the animal kingdom was strange, try the kingdom of the plant. Especially terrestrial species had much more time to evolve into what they are now than any fully terrestrial animal species ever had. When mosses like the liverwort started to take over the land, it took quite some time before aquatic animals started to take on a terrestrial life permanently.

It is believed that liverwort, the first species that could live on land, did so 476 million years ago. The first independent terrestrial animal is thought to have moved on land 450 million years ago, Now, 27 million years look like nothing over a period of nearly 500 million years, but humans, or more specifically: primitive Homo sapiens first appeared 300.000 years ago. So terrestrial plant life has an advantage of more than 475 million years over people and 27 million over terrestrial animals. That is 90x the time it took for humans to evolve from primitive homo sapiens to what we are today. Take the modern homo sapiens and we’re talking about 200.000 years back in time.

We as a species are just a blip, animals though, or plants… That’s a whole different story.