yeah moss is great but how about a vascular plant that has basically ... gone back to the way of the moss...
Azorella compacta
It's... it's a carrot that has given up on having leaves...
Imagine a hostile planet with plants like this... could you tell that they once grew in less cold and arid climates? What if flora of the twilight days of a planet look like the earliest life... but when you look closer there are abilities, and structures that tell their history....
@futurebird I saw these llareta in Atacama and they were absolutely incredible. Alien. (They’re endangered now because they grow so slowly and miners harvested them for fuel)
@futurebird and then there's Punotia lagopus. I took this photo from a bus driving by https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20185839 but there are better shots out there. It just looks like a pale boulder. Only 20 observations on iNaturalist, probably because nobody realizes they are looking at a plant.
@futurebird I got all excited thinking this was the "star plant" that made me so happy when I was trekking in Ecuador, but the range and altitude didn't quite match. Turns out I was looking for Plantago rigida, which looks very similar, because apparently convergent evolution gave us a number of plant families with hardy little high-altitude cushion plants like this. TIL!