# Were There Bizarre Prehistoric Plants? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 18, 2008, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179 "2008-02-18T23:07:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Nobody\_Special](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/bbce88/32.png) [@Nobody\_Special](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nobody_Special)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2008, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/1 "2008-02-18T23:07:59Z")
Looking at pictures of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animal, I was amazed by some of the bizarre creatures that used to roam the Earth. An illustration of a group a herbivores munching on tree leaves got me thinking: were there equally-bizarre prehistoric plants? Maybe a predecessor of the pine tree with 25 pound pine cones. ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2008, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/2 "2008-02-18T23:51:52Z")
Certainly, there were many Mesozoic era plants which are extinct. How “bizarre” you might find them is another question. Flowering plants did note evolve until the Cretaceous or late Jurassic, so most dinosaur era was dominated by things like conifers, cycads, ferns, and ginko trees. I suspect a lot of them were rather like modern species. Here’s a page with a bit of info on it, although it’s a kid’s page: > **[Dinosaurs and Plants - ZoomDinosaurs.com](https://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/plants/)** > > Dinosaurs and Plants: Mesozoic Era Plants, including seed ferns, conifers, gingkos, cycadophytes, club mosses, horsetails, ferns, and flowering plants. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2008, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/3 "2008-02-18T23:56:21Z")
Short answer: yes. I suppose you’d like something more. What is a “bizarre” plant? Probably one that doesn’t match most modern plants in size, shape, or details of form, I’d presume. We don’t get the kind of detail on plants, as a rule, that we do on animals, in terms of fossils. If an animal had a long neck, that neck had neckbones inside it. If a fossil sea creature had a strange-looking shell, the shell is fossilized. If giant fangs, or peculiar horns, they get fossilized. But if a plant had a flower that looked exactly like a nesting archaeopteryx, odds are we’ll never know. If it had xix-foot-wide leaves, the likelihood of their being preserved is only marginally higher. What we get for plant fossils is (a) pollen – lots and lots of pollen; the field of palynology specializes in studying it. Much of what know of fossil plants is strictly through their pollen. (b) Impressions of soft tissues, like leaves. Rare but interesting when available. © Petrifaction of hard parts, mostly wood, as at the Petrified Forest. But consider distinguishing between an oak, a willow, a pine, and a ginkgo simply on the basis of trunk anatomy – that’s not how most people would tell the differences. What we do know is this, there were three (arguably four) ages of plants, and they don’t match those of animals well. 1. Carboniferous and Permian. Characterized by ferns, some of them tree ferns, and primitive vascular plants, some of them large. Tree ferns survive today in some tropical sites. Of the vascular plants, the horsetails, scouring rushes, ground pines, and such are the survivors – many of their relatives were large and strange looking. (This age began in the Devonian, and possibly earlier, and probably continued into the Triassic.) 2. Jurassic and Early Cretaceous. Characteried by ferns and gymnosperms. In addition to lots of confiers, this also includes relatives of the ginkgo, cycads, relatives of _Ephedra_, and a host of extinct more distantly related forms: Cordiatales, Bennettitales, Cycadeioids, and the like. Probably some oddballs in this set too: cycads are weird by anyone’s standards, and _Welwitschia_ is a survivor of a widespread group. The flora of Age 1 was replaced by that of Age 2 during the Triassic and Early Jurassic. The distinct line between the two epochs of the Cretaceous happens to fall at 100 million years ago, and the flora since then is more-or-less modern. 3. Late Cretaceous to Oligocene. Ferns remain significant particularly in forest understory, but are no longer a major element of the flora. Gymnosperms remain important, but the non-Conifer forms are no longer major parts of most floras. The angiosperms (flowering plants) begin in the earliest Late Cretaceous and burgeon rapidly to become the dominant part of the flora. The Magnoliaceae are among the earliest – the picture of a group of Cretaceous dinosaurs hanging out under the magnolia trees is strange but very true to life. 3A. As the Miocene opens, the grasses become the preferred ground cover almost everywhere except steep slopes and some forest understories. Everything else remains much the same, new species replacing old within the same major groups – but the movement from ferns, vetches, and such to grasses is such a major shift that it almost warrants terming it new floral age. As for your giant cones, they did exist – but were the fruit of cycads, not conifers. They would develop a giant pine-cone-like structure at the top of the central stalk, above the leaves. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2008, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/4 "2008-02-19T00:26:32Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] Welwitschia [/QUOTE] [Welwitschia image](http://www.biolib.cz/cz/taxonimage/id18227/?taxonid=14891&type=1) [Lepidodendron](http://www.dkimages.com/discover/Home/Science/Earth-Sciences/Palaeontology/Prehistoric-Plants/Prehistoric-Plants-06.html) Not a plant, but a giant ‘tree fungus’: [Prototaxites](http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/07/070423.fungus.shtml) which grew [more than 20 feet tall (pic).](http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/07/images/070423.fungus-prototaxites.jpg) ---
**Author:** ![Concoctious](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/3be4f8/32.png) [@Concoctious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Concoctious)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2008, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/5 "2008-02-19T02:09:35Z")
That’s the saddest looking welwitscia I’ve ever seen. What, they couldn’t at least brush the sand off that welwitschia? Way to go, Poland! ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2008, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/6 "2008-02-19T02:33:58Z")
[QUOTE=Concoctious] That’s the saddest looking welwitscia I’ve ever seen. [/QUOTE] Yeah, there are plenty of prettier shots on the web. I wanted one with a little _pathos_. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2008, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/7 "2008-02-19T02:44:59Z")
[QUOTE=Squink] Yeah, there are plenty of prettier shots on the web. I wanted one with a little _pathos_. 🙂 [/QUOTE] You got it, all right. That’s practically Charlie Brown’s Welwitschia! ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2008, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/8 "2008-02-19T03:02:29Z")
I love this board! Where else (except maybe a board for botany geeks) could you get into a discussion on the comparative qualities of Welwitschia photography? And that painting of _Prototaxites_ in the mist has got to be the eeriest prehistoric-life picture I’ve ever seen – they look like Cthulhu’s dildos! ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2008, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/9 "2008-02-19T03:17:08Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] And that painting of _Prototaxites_ in the mist has got to be the eeriest prehistoric-life picture I’ve ever seen – they look like Cthulhu’s dildos! [/QUOTE] I’m pretty sure Cthulhu’s dildos would have tentacles… ---
**Author:** ![Darryl\_Lict](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7cd45c/32.png) [@Darryl\_Lict](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darryl_Lict)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2008, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/10 "2008-02-19T05:47:15Z")
There’s quite a few [Bunya Bunya trees](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_bidwillii) here in Santa Barbara. I guess they are native to Australia. A girl I knew had one in her front yard. I had heard that people have been killed by the seed cones, which weight up to 15 pounds. Check out the [bunyas](http://waynesword.palomar.edu/images/sarabu1b.jpg) on this girl! [QUOTE=Wikipedia] The bunya pine (A. bidwillii) is the last surviving species of the Section Bunya of the genus Araucaria. This section was diverse and widespread during the Mesozoic with some species having cone morphology similar to A. bidwillii, which appeared during the Jurassic. Fossils of Section Bunya are found in South America and Europe. [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![Washoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ecae2f/32.png) [@Washoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Washoe)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2008, 6:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/11 "2008-02-19T06:45:13Z")
[QUOTE=Darryl Lict] There’s quite a few [Bunya Bunya trees](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_bidwillii) here in Santa Barbara. [/QUOTE] I’ll bet you’ve been to Lotusland a time or two. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2008, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/12 "2008-02-20T02:11:40Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] What we do know is this, there were three (arguably four) ages of plants, and they don’t match those of animals well. 1. Carboniferous and Permian. Characterized by ferns, some of them tree ferns, and primitive vascular plants, some of them large. Tree ferns survive today in some tropical sites. Of the vascular plants, the horsetails, scouring rushes, ground pines, and such are the survivors – many of their relatives were large and strange looking. (This age began in the Devonian, and possibly earlier, and probably continued into the Triassic.) [/QUOTE] Would this have been preceded by an age of mosses? ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2008, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-there-bizarre-prehistoric-plants/438179/13 "2008-02-20T19:38:13Z")
I think that, at the very least, for a plant to be bizarre, it must either be: (1) locomotive, or (2) carnivorous. Right? 😃