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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

These aren't necessarily related to today's Ophiocordyceps fungus. Fungi that take control of arthropods and cause them to climb to disperse spores have convergently evolved more than once, including Arthrophaga myriapodina, which affects millipedes, and is in a different Division (the level above Class) from Ophiocordyceps.

Convergent evolution is more common than you might think. Trees, for example, have separately evolved at least 100 times.

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I recently visited the national history museum and finally got a sense of the _weirdness_ of prehistoric trees. No bark, a green trunk (utilizing photosynthesis), tall like a palm tree. I'd love to see something like that now.

That sounds awesome! The oddest trees I have come across had big thorns like roses all over the trunk. Kind of hard to see because the trunk is so big, but you'd very quickly notice leaning against it.

That was in a botanical garden in Australia. No idea what they were or how common they are. Blew my mind.

Ceiba speciosa maybe? That is a weird tree for sure. I grew up where there were wild thorny honeylocust trees. The trunks are spotted with dense clusters of branching thorns, some of which are 8" long and stiff enough to puncture tractor tires. To paraphrase family guy, nature is scary.

Yeah, we've got these in Beersheba (south of Israel). The only tree my ten year old won't climb. They've also got really interesting cotton-like fruits, though I'm not brave enough to taste them.

Sounds like the nightmare tree I had to deal with as well. I never did find out what it was. Does the honeylocust produce a bunch of red berries? My dad used to get mad at me as a teen when I’d be lazy and not pick up the fallen limbs from this tree and puncture the tractor tires. It was to the sole reason I became very proficient at using the tire repair kit.

The oddest tree I know of is poplar, which is incredibly common around here and is basically considered junk wood. Turns out, those individual, fast-growing trees are in fact stems of a large underground root system.

One of these trees has 47,000 stems:

> Most agree [...] that Pando encompasses 42.89 hectares (106 acres), weighs an estimated 6,000 metric tons (6,600 short tons) or 13.2 million pounds, and features an estimated 47,000 stems, which die individually and are replaced by genetically identical stems that are sent up from the tree's vast root system, a process known as "suckering". The root system is estimated to be several thousand years old, with habitat modeling suggesting a maximum age of 14,000 years and 16,000 years by the latest (2024) estimate.[

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

Poplars have underground roots, but they are not "underground root stems" per se. Their main stem is the trunk we see growing above ground.

I'm mostly using the terminology from the Pando article. The article quotes a "Mitton and Grant" as writing:

> quaking aspen regularly reproduces via a process called suckering. An individual stem can send out lateral roots that, under the right conditions, send up other erect stems; from all above-ground appearances the new stems look just like individual trees. The process is repeated until a whole stand, of what appear to be individual trees, forms. This collection of multiple stems, called ramets, all form one, single, genetic individual, usually termed a clone.

Poplar is considered junk wood? This is news to me. I’ve seen plenty of poplar furniture.

It’s too soft to be of much use except the odd piece of furniture (for which it is pretty terrible because it dents too easily). As a woodworker finishing it also sucks because the fibers tear too easily. Its grain pattern looks bland at best, it ages poorly, and its color is too inconsistent from tree to tree.

That said, it’s one of the most stable woods so it doesn’t warp much which is why it’s a popular base material for plywood and it’s easy on cutting tools. I usually only use it for the interior parts of drawers.

It also grows very fast, particularly (per acre) if closely spaced, which makes it of interest for biofuels.

https://farm-energy.extension.org/poplar-populus-spp-trees-f...

It's considered to be a poor firewood around here, as well.

Which is all great for arrow shafts actually. Just may need to be thicker than usual.

The Mary Rose shafts seem to mostly have been poplar.

Not that this would be very relevant nowadays but still.

It's often used as trim that's painted over, as many don't consider the wood pretty. I love seeing poplar with a wide variety of colors.

It’s brittle, light and flimsy. It has its uses but is not great for furnitures or burning.

My favorite odd tree is the ginkgo. The way the leaves are look ancient, like a tree from a fargone era. And it is exactly that.

Also the fruit was fun to throw at people when I was a kid... Very stinky.

I don't know if you are talking about Drunken tree (palo borracho in spanish) but once playing soccer in a field with some of them I ended with around 15 funny parallels cuts. Good old times.

> visited the national history museum

what nation?

Sorry, I was referring to the Smithsonian National History Museum

Well, bamboo comes to mind as a really weird tree. It's not a tree, but it's the size of one..

> prehistoric trees

I suppose you are actually talking of a time preceding prehistory by a fair lot!

How can something precede history. Isn’t that just older history?

Conventionally, History starts with written records. Everything that came before is prehistoric. It’s useful as a concept when discussion groups of humans in the last 10-odd millennia, but not really for things that are a couple of millions years old.

> Everything that came before is prehistoric.

Hi, Wikipedia doesn't agree with you:

> Prehistory [...] is the period of _human_ history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems.

Emphasis mine on "human".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory

Yes, you are right. I was thinking in the context of human populations. And then there is the question of what is human and what is not, and the limit between archaeology and paleontology when considering homininae.

which museum? Do you mean the Natural History Museum in New York?

The Smithsonian in DC

Closest you can come today is probably a tree fern. I've got a Dicksonia antarctica in my living room under grow lights. It's a neat plant.

Those look a lot like the ones I saw in the museum. Very cool plant!

Cycads are pretty old

Pot plants have no bark and a green trunk and can reach heights of like 12 ft.

My favourite tree evolution thing is the forests in the Galapagos being evolved from dandelion seeds blown in on the wind from South America.

Fascinating. Do you have a link to that, or the name of that species?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalesia

I heard about it on the David Attenborough's Galapagos series:

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/david-attenborough-s-galapagos

Here is a YouTube playlist, I think it was episode 3, Evolution:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3iXsS5tZSZG4gcYrblBd...

Also see the wiki page mentioned in the sibling comment.

Mullberry plants are weird. They're happy to exist as a small shrub or a 60ft tree, depending on how they're cultivated.

One of the largest trees I've ever personally seen was a mullberry on some long-abandoned land adjoining mine. But they're also a bush?

> Trees, for example, have separately evolved at least 100 times.

Can you explain more? Sounds interesting

Not OP, but:

https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

Thank you for link.

As an aside there: the blog post briefly talks about birds. It turns out that membrane wings are much easier to evolve than feathered wings. There have been lots of membrane winged creatures (including "birds" with membrane wings in the Jurassic) but not nearly as many appearances of feathered wings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxA38gH8Gj4

Trees are barely a firm category of plant at all. It's basically just tall plants with woody stems. Plants can gain and lose woody stems without too much trouble (relatively speaking, over evolutionary time). So any time a plant species currently growing soft stems can benefit from being really tall, they have a good chance of evolving into "trees".

I’ve seen rather large cactus turn the base of their stems woody and bark clad.

One example is oak trees being more closely related to tulips than to pine trees.

(Tulips and oak trees are both angiosperms, flowering plants, and share a common angiosperm ancestor. Pine trees on the other hand are gymnosperms.)

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