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On trees... (mander.xyz)
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[-] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 1 points 39 seconds ago

I think palm trees are a kind of grass

[-] Anomalocaris@lemm.ee 11 points 1 hour ago

I'm a billion years, crabs will start turning into trees and trees into crabs. merging into the ubercreature

[-] khannie@lemmy.world 10 points 1 hour ago

I'm a billion years

Damn. You look good for your age.

[-] VernetheJules@hexbear.net 1 points 1 hour ago

you may not like it but Ms Crabtree is what peak performance looks like

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 39 points 4 hours ago

Also cool that for a period of like 60 million years, nothing decomposed dead trees. As they would die or fall over, they'd just stay there, piling up. This is where most oil came from. The massive amounts of trees stacking up before bacteria and fungus evolved to decomposed them. Imagine 60 million years worth of trees just lying around.

[-] Dogyote@slrpnk.net 13 points 3 hours ago

Didn't those trees become coal, not oil?

[-] DancingBear@midwest.social 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I think near water they became oil and far from water they became coal

[-] InverseParallax@lemmy.world 7 points 1 hour ago

Oil was effectively plankton and other sea stuff.

Coal was forests.

[-] RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 6 points 1 hour ago

No, most coal comes from plants in swamps, because the water helped preserve the organic matter.

Plants in swamps die -> organic matter on the bottom of the swamp -> peat -> brown coal -> black coal.

Oil apparently comes mostly from plankton.

On the different origins: https://www.carboeurope.org/how-are-fossil-fuels-formed-the-science-behind-oil-coal-and-natural-gas/

[-] ravenaspiring@sh.itjust.works 8 points 4 hours ago

I love this fact, and am curious where you learned it?

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 3 hours ago

I learned it nearly 30 years ago in school. I just did a search and found a link about it, though.

Also, seems that either I remembered wrongly, or my teacher made a mistake, but it seems it was most of the worlds coal; not oil, that came from all the piles of trees from that period.

https://www.thorogood.co.uk/treevolution-how-trees-came-first-and-rot-came-later-in-earths-deep-past/

[-] Dogyote@slrpnk.net 6 points 3 hours ago

Trees are like every other plant, ONLY MORE SO

[-] ShimmeringKoi@hexbear.net 6 points 4 hours ago

Its basically just the best way to be a large plant if you're not gonna be a big parasitic ivy. Once your plant circulatory system gets complex enough to send stuff further away, you start getting big enough that you need hard tissues just to stop yourself from folding over.

[-] NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world 25 points 6 hours ago

Also, no such thing as fish.

Google it.

[-] boydster@sh.itjust.works 19 points 5 hours ago

Impossible. If there were no such thing as fish, how could bees be fish?

[-] NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world 20 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I don’t have the tools to know how to respond to this comment. You win.

Edit: Holy shit. I just did a quick google. Boydster is not shitting us. Just google “bees are fish.” Oddly enough, this actually furthers the thesis of fish not existing.

[-] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 5 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I don’t have the tools to know how to respond to this comment. You win.

This is the best way I've ever seen utter befuddlement expressed. Chapeau!

[-] Devmapall@lemm.ee 12 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

To add on for anyone who is lazy like me, the thing where Google summarizes says California has classified bees as fish under an environmental protection act. According to the first result (Reddit) it's because fish is a catch all term in that law. Instead of listing all the animals they just use fish. Because fish,bees, and the other animals are all invertebrates.

Now whoever reads this has three Lemmy comments, a reddit thread reference, and an ai overview reference as some solid sources

[-] DancingBear@midwest.social 9 points 3 hours ago

Fish are vertebrates they have a backbone

[-] SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 minutes ago

Some fish are, yeah

[-] Zink@programming.dev 5 points 4 hours ago

What a nicely packaged little subthread to come across while decompressing after a super busy day, lol!

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[-] hash@slrpnk.net 31 points 6 hours ago

So that's why every stargate planet looks like Canada

[-] Knuschberkeks@leminal.space 2 points 40 minutes ago

Sadly Lemmy isn't big enough to support niche communities, but I really enjoyed r/unexpectedstargate back in the day.

[-] ravenaspiring@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 hours ago

🤣🤣🤣

[-] Deconceptualist@lemm.ee 30 points 6 hours ago

My sister in law recently quipped that "Trees are a social construct" and at first I thought she was just being glib but now I can't get that statement out of my head.

[-] resting_parrot@sh.itjust.works 15 points 5 hours ago

I listen to a podcast called Completely Arbortrary. They talk about a different tree species each episode. They say trees are a strategy, not a strict definition.

[-] SOB_Van_Owen@lemm.ee 3 points 2 hours ago

Thanks! Just subscribed. See they have a couple Metasequoia episodes -a favorite of mine .

[-] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 8 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

The genus Cornus is a huge middle finger to growth-form-based taxonomy. It contains dogwood trees and also bunchberry, an itty bitty herb that grows on the forest floor.

The first "trees" were also lycopods whose closest extant relatives are the club mosses, a name which gives you an idea of how big they get. All the coal in the world is from a period where plants figured out wood before decomposers learned how to break it down and is mainly the result of a bunch of lycopod trunks sinking into peat bugs and slowly getting compressed.

[-] m_xy@lemmy.world 33 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

here’s a cool blog post that expands on this There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)

i didn’t even put it in a bookmark folder, it’s just loose on my bookmark bar because it’s such an interesting post that i reread from time to time

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[-] twice_hatch@midwest.social 31 points 8 hours ago
[-] whotookkarl@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

Not to be confused with Dryococelus aka the "tree lobster"

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[-] DeathsEmbrace@lemm.ee 36 points 8 hours ago

Its called convergent evolution and you also have some shit you wouldnt believe that makes all apes similar to us.

[-] OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 9 points 5 hours ago

Apes are so similar to us because we came from a common ancestor. I'd love to hear if there are traits we evolved independently after we split though.

[-] TaiCrunch@sh.itjust.works 8 points 6 hours ago

Hit me. I love evolutionary fun facts.

[-] sit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 hours ago
[-] CooperRedArmyDog@lemmy.ml 9 points 7 hours ago

Well humans are a type of great ape, sooooll

[-] sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 108 points 10 hours ago

Had to look it up because I didnt beleive

sure enough its correct

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree

[-] ch00f@lemmy.world 86 points 10 hours ago

Something poetic and quaint about a link to a Wikipedia article titled "Tree"

[-] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 23 points 8 hours ago

reddit has broken me. I was expecting it to point to weed.

[-] Rusty@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I was expecting an undirected acyclic graph.

[-] ch00f@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Yo momma so fat she sat on a binary tree and squashed it into a linked list in O(1) time.

[-] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 15 points 4 hours ago
[-] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 2 points 17 minutes ago

Reddit has broken me. I was expecting a rickroll

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this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
744 points (98.6% liked)

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