What is moss? This was the question I had to sheepishly Google when I was starting this project. It is a plant— and most of what we call "moss" is actually a collection of hundreds or thousands of tiny moss plants, working together to conserve moisture and stay fixed to whatever surface they're growing on.
Most plants were see around are angiosperms, or flowering plants (this includes everything from duckweed to flowers to oak trees), with a few exceptions such as conifers and ferns. Mosses are only distantly related to all of these, and form their own "clade" (group of organisms with a common ancestor) called Bryophyta. (For comparison, "mammals" are a clade in the animal kingdom.)
Instead of flowers, moss produce sporophytes, which are little capsules on a stalk full of spores that release (they reproduce in a few different ways, but this is one of them). I was surprised to find some sporophytes in the nearby woods growing on a cottonwood tree, even in the middle of winter!
Have you seen any moss this week?
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