INTRODUCTION TO MOSS IDENTIFICATION   

1. "I don't know my mosses"

Have you ever said "I don't know my mosses"? Many skilled botanists who have tackled other challenging plant groups such as grasses, sedges, ferns or the Asteraceae still think mossses are "out there," beyond the reach of ordinary naturalists.  Not so! They're just small, that's all. With a couple of microscopes, some fine-pointed tweezers, and Howard Crum's excellent manual Mosses of the Great Lakes Forest, you can learn how to identify these charming plants. Then you can move on to saying "I don't know my liverworts." It never ends, does it? 

The place of mosses in the plant kingdom

The plant kingdom is divided into a number of "Divisions" (the equivalent of phyla in the animal kingdom). There are about 10 to 13 division recognized, the exact number depending on how much the particular authority lumps or splits divisions. [Note: the most modern treatments also have moved things around a bit, too. For example, horsetail/scouring rush (Equisetum) is now classified as a true fern. This web page hasn't incorporated those changes yet.] This figure from a really good introductory biology textbook, Biology: Concepts and Connections by Campbell, Reece, Mitchell and Taylor, shows a simplified phylogeny (evolutionary tree) of plants. Notice that the group labelled "bryophytes" evolved before the other plant groups, i.e., prior to the development either of vascular tissue or seeds.  

Here in Ohio we have most, but not all of the world's major plant groups represented as wild components of the flora (we lack psilophytes, gnetophytes, cycads, and ginkgo). The ones we have are: 

• Flowering plants (angiosperms), the "superstars of the plant kingdom. They produce seeds enclosed in an ovary, which develops into a fruit when ripe. Angiosperms are the only plants that produce true flowers.

• The only gymnosperms in Ohio are conifers. Consisting mainly of needle-leaved evergreen trees, these produce "naked" seeds (i.e., not enclosed in an ovary) at the base of woody scales arranged in a spiral, the familar "pine cone."

• Ohio has several types of seedless vascular plants (ferns and "fern allies"): horsetails/scouring rushes,  clubmosses, spikemosses, quillworts and --the most abundant and familar group --ferns. 

• There are three groups of bryophytes. Division Anthocerotophyta are the hornworts, Marchantiophyta comprises liverworts, and Bryophyta are mosses. 

Bryophytes are non-vascular plants with a dominant gametophyte.