Last week in Toronto, we visited the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Where we toured its paleontology exhibit that focuses on the very most ancient forms of life that once lived in what is now Canada. Imagine, it is about 565 million years ago. The ocean is dark and quiet, but there is life. There mysterious creatures huddle along the muddy seafloor. But then something happened—volcanic ash rained down, suffocating the organisms under a soft, grey cloud making fossils.

Today, this land is known as Mistaken Point, a jagged cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also the oldest site in the world to show fossil communities of large and complex multicellular life. These fossils mark a shift in Earth’s history—when life went from microscopic and got big.

This post deals with in particular two forms of early terrestrial plant life, cooksonia and clubmoss. Both of which lived around the same time during the early colonization of land. While cooksonia is now extinct, it represents the foundational baseline of early vascular plants. Clubmosses represent a more advanced, and more importantly surviving extant branch of these ancient vascular plants. Above are two photos from ROM, one showing a cooksonia fossil and the other showing a model representation of this plant. Below is some living clubmoss from down the beach. Still going strong after 400M years on this planet.

Meanwhile, in the here-and-now, Jay, Anne and Bill left this morning, heading south towards the warmth. Leaving two old souls to shiver here alone. Jay lit a nice fire before she left, but since we want to do some things today, we have let it go out. While the fire is extinct, we are extant.