noxtheox SENT: are lily pads particularly basal to the angiosperms? I'm pretty well up on my metazoan taxonomy but I gotta admit I know next to nothing about plant taxonomy
well, there are actually multiple families basal to all flowering plants; they’re referred to as being ‘ANITA grade’ or ‘ANA grade’, standing for the orders (and i’m gonna link their wikipedia pages here for Strange Plant Enjoyment) Amborellales, Nymphaeales, and Austrobaileyales. the ‘ANITA’ acronym refers to the first three plus the (supposed) orderIlliciales and the family Trimeniaceae; their positioning in this is a bit spicy and contested as i take it, though, so i should note that the first three are the major ones, with most of the plants we call ‘lily pads’ resting in the Nymphaeales.
BUT. fun fact that got me a bit riled up when i first learned about it last month: ‘lily pads’ as a concept have apparently evolved a couple times in flowering plants, so the order Nymphaeales (containing the traditional lily pad family Nymphaeaceae as well as a couple other non-lily pad aquatic plant families)is a basal group, but Nelumbonaceae– the family that consists of the two species of sacred lotus that are out there– is not (instead it belongs to the order Proteales; this was only figured out in the past couple decades with the innovation of molecular research).
anyway. that aside, yeah, these guys are pretty prehistoric. like idk why i’m so impressed with how innovative ‘hm….leaf float’ as an idea ended up being, but i am; that being said, like, the flowers on these are one of those plant things where upon further inspection it’s like…….oh man this is definitely a dinosaur plant. like look at this thing
like. i cannot believe the guy narrating this video is so calm. like @ national geographic those beetles are in hell and all you people can think about is dubbing it with tranquil spa music
weird lemon from @/dabi-hawks on twitter??? what happened here (submitted by @allgreenisgoodgreen)
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ah yes…..the citrons strike again….i can only offer vaguely that it looks like a lemon that started turning into a buddha’s hand citron halfway through. another option would be that the plant got damage/an infection in it’s growing tip, which messed up the hormones, confused it, and made it grow like this (usually referred to as ‘fasciation’ in plants; it usually looks a bit more crest-like when it happens tho).
a while back when i first learned about saxifragaceae i came on here and was like ‘haha wow everybody this plant just has everything hanging out!! like put some pants on am i right fellas’ and somebody responded like ‘wait until you see euphorbiaceae’ and internally i was like ‘ohohgsdohoh nothing can top the visceral discomfort of observing a member of saxifragaceae’ and i just want to say i am sorry. i should have listened
