"Fish" is almost a good category, you only need to nuke a unusual branch and call it a day.
A better comparison is "Fliyers", that include most insects, most birds, bats, pterodactyls and perhaps a few gliding and kitting animals. It evolveded and disappeared a few times.
Thank you! Isn’t it amazing how a rigid hierarchical categorization system fails everywhere you actually look into details?
See also category theory vs prototype theory.
It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxonomies are arbitrary - they're created by people for some specific purpose, and judged by useful they are in serving that purpose.
You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.
Well, no, what we're saying here is that if you use a rigid, hierarchical catergorisation system (cladistics) you can say that there is no such monophyletic grouping as a fish. Ie there is no grouping with a common ancestor that encompasses all the things, and only the things, that we commonly call fish. That system hasn't failed, it's fine, its purpose is to categorise things in terms of evolutionary descent. However, under that system humans are reptiles and trees and fish aren't useful categories. There exist other systems of catergorisation, which are polyphyletic or paraphyletic, which fit better with commonly used language, and we get back fish, trees, non-avian non-mammalian reptiles. Neither of them are wrong, they're just differently used and differently useful. It's like knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but nobody wants it in a fruit salad. People tend to struggle when things exist in multiple naming systems and categories for some reason.
An unusual tree I remember fondly as a child, is in the Karri forests of south-western Australia[1] .. we'd driven through a wild and stormy afternoon to get to it, a friend of my mother had gotten permission and the cabin key, as it was closed to the public then - and so it was that we were climbing the slippery, seemingly fragile iron posts that ringed its trunk[2] all the way to the top to find ourselves cramped into a fire lookout cabin .. we camped overnight in tight sleeping bags with a cold can of baked beans and yesterdays toast for breakfast, and I will always remember the lissajous swing of the thing, carefully turning the resonance of the wind into a constant figure 8, around and around, sometimes in minute increments gradually widening and slowing .. but every now and then, a big fast sweep would happen on the wind, and the tree would translate it through an odd crack into a bigger leverage, and that sleep that was so close gets pushed just a bit beyond the conscious horizon as one wondered, literally, if the tree was finally going to fall .. after a hundred or so years .. but still, just a few hours later, all is calm, the bush is slowly thawing out, the relentless sun conquers the horizon, the iron rungs dry out, the trees leaves steam in the morning sunrise, this great behemoths strength feeling safer and safer as we take gravitys' step .. and we are just too soon back on the ground and off for some surf out at Yallingup or so ..
A beautiful living thing which my perception of its rythmic swing has lived on with me for decades. Trees are lovely.
I would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual.
Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
As an unusual tree I’ve always liked the Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides. It was known only from fossil record and thought extinct until a small grove was found in a mountain valley in China in 1946. There was a wave of popularity and a bunch were planted worldwide, which are now mature and easy to find if you want to see one. They grow well and very quickly in cool to temperate climates. They have little tiny deciduous needle-leaves that don't need to be raked, and grow tall and symmetrical without spreading too wide.
I started 2 sprouts I bought by mail order, after one growing season they were nearly 3 feet tall. I got them mail order from Jonsteen Nursery, they have been specializing in various redwood saplings for many years. https://sequoiatrees.com/
The UK has quite a few ancient yew trees. Some may be over 2000 years old. Often they are in church grounds (because ones that weren't got cut down to make long bows perhaps?).
Since we're talking trees. Only trees that grow in an area with distinct warm/cold cycles have rings, tropical trees don't and the only way to tell the age of most tropical trees is to have planted it yourself
One of my favorite trees is Couroupita guianensis, known by a few other names (ayahuma, cannonball tree). When mature the trunks grow some beautiful flowers that can cover the trunk (wiki link has a few good pics). Native to South America, it's a revered tree in Amazonian plant shamanism (all parts of the plant can be used medicinally; spiritually it is one of the big ones, an entire school of its own). It made its way to India in the 1800s where it holds a lot of renown and importance now.
A while back I read this book "The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter" from Colin Tudge and I was blown away by the fact that Mangrove roots effectively breath with the rhythm of tide. As the water recedes, change in pressure and the air is drawn into the pores. As the water comes in, pressure pushes stale air out and seals the pores. Trees are beautiful.
I like to imagine aliens visiting earth and walking straight past us and communing with Pando.
> Recent 2024 analysis confirmed it is at least 16,000 years old, with possibilities ranging up to 80,000 years, making it one of the oldest living organisms.
There is something fascinating about someone getting a copy of Encyclopedia Brititanica, reading about trees, and then going to Wikipedia for pictures and to fill out details.
This is (was?) the advantage of a printed encyclopedia - one that I've never really been able to replicate scrolling wikipedia. I think it has more to do with the limitations and lack of linking than lack of information (each of these trees has a wikipedia article).
A wikipedia dive session is likely to get more and more specific into trees (attacked by twees!); an encyclopedia flip session is more likely to go across a wide variety of subjects.
The trees are not unusual at all for the people living in tropical climates. Fun trees Yes but unusual no. Most people of the world live in tropical climates so for most these are not unusual
87 comments
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
A better comparison is "Fliyers", that include most insects, most birds, bats, pterodactyls and perhaps a few gliding and kitting animals. It evolveded and disappeared a few times.
You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.
A beautiful living thing which my perception of its rythmic swing has lived on with me for decades. Trees are lovely.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_diversicolor
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester_Tree
Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasequoia_glyptostroboides
I started 2 sprouts I bought by mail order, after one growing season they were nearly 3 feet tall. I got them mail order from Jonsteen Nursery, they have been specializing in various redwood saplings for many years. https://sequoiatrees.com/
https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2017/12/12/the-travel...
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2025/08/ancient-yew-tr...
Two examples right from downtown São Paulo,
https://kenschutte.com/lima-to-rio-by-bus/images/trees.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couroupita_guianensis
> Recent 2024 analysis confirmed it is at least 16,000 years old, with possibilities ranging up to 80,000 years, making it one of the oldest living organisms.
[0]: https://imgur.com/gallery/what-kind-of-plant-is-this-grew-le...
[0]https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platano_di_Vrisi
> but you know wood? You know when you hold something in your hand, and it’s made of wood, and you can tell that? Yeah, that thing.
everyone should have a copy of Identifying Wood on their metal bookshelf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSch_NgZpQs
A wikipedia dive session is likely to get more and more specific into trees (attacked by twees!); an encyclopedia flip session is more likely to go across a wide variety of subjects.