are isoetes the plants that used to be like... Bigger than every other type of plant? Idk how to describe it better than that I just vaguely remember hearing something like that a while ago. Like they were the Head Chungus of plants
they were the head chungus!! well, the megaflora in their family were the head chungus. like there were big versions and small versions going on and when the continents split and the swamps dried up, the big chungus versions died and the small versions evolved a bit and became what we know as isoetes today. this means that modern isoetes are a whole six or so classes of extinct giant prehistoric trees away from their closest living ‘cousin’, Lycopodium, which looks COMPLETELY different from them to the point where its confusing at first. this is also why their anatomy is so incredibly fucked up: there’s literally nothing else like it on earth bc everything close to it is dead.
but yeah, during the first real ‘boom’ of plants all over the world in the carboniferous period, the isoetes family was the primary base of ecosystems in a ton of massive prehistoric swamps. because fungus hadn’t evolved yet to break down the plant tissues, when these massive 100 foot tall Units (members of a subgenus called lepidodendron) would come down shit would just pile on top of them and compress them, making what we now know as coal. most coal veins are the remains of these prehistoric swamps, and its (from what ive heard from the paleobotany person at my uni) actually not uncommon to come across fossils of them around old mines.
this is what these swamps used to look like btw:
ive found that the funky look of these plants as we see them in fossils is best understood if u consider how the sister family Lycopodium i talked about earlier in this post looks:
mixing that with how isoetes looks (note the tiny woody section under the leaves of the cut open one in the middle; this is believe to be what remains of those giant prehistoric tree trunks, which is Wild):
and you can almost imagine like....how something Like Those might have lived/looked. ive called them ‘uncanny valley plants’ before and i stand by that
