How come I only learned of these through a wikipedia hole? This shit is amazing to me. It seems to me that these brown algae - known as "sea palms" - are a transitional species, not only having developed the ability to support themselves on land, but also having developed a way to avoid dessication. I can only imagine how dense jungles would be if low-lying brown algae littered the understory, sucking up the green light plants don't use. Given the superficial similarities between plants and brown algae (yes, I am aware that they are very distantly related), I wonder why this isn't considered an excellent model species for studying the transition of plants from the sea onto land. There must be something I'm missing, because I don't see a single scientific journal article anywhere call them transitional species, and there doesn't seem to be any interest in how they survive out of water for limited periods of time. As far as I am aware, all nonvascular plants today are still rather far-removed from the earliest land plants, and the only sea plants today are modern angiosperms which recolonized the sea, so you would think botanists would be dying to place a few of the missing links back into their chain. If you all know something I don't that explains why this thing generates absolutely no scientific interest, please do tell.