Imagining an Ancient Landscape

Reading this sign upon entering the Fern Room at the Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago triggers the imagination and helps you picture what the landscape looked like millions of years ago. But no, that rustle you hear back in the foliage is not really a dinosaur!

Fern Room
A small dinosaur would feel at home in the Fern Room.
Many types of plants in this room grew at the time of the dinosaurs. They include ferns, mosses, and cycads, and they have changed little from their ancestors that lived more than 200 million years ago.
Prehistoric landscapes might have looked like this.
Long before Illinois was covered by prairies, it was a wet, tropical forest. Seed plants had not evolved, and many of the early plants reproduced with dust-like, airborne spores. This room brings together the living relics of those ancient plants to recreate a scene from long ago.

These raised bumps are clusters of spore-producing structures called sporangia.
Inside each of those little bumps, thousands of microscopic, dust-like spores are developing. Once they mature, the sori will open up and release the airborne spores into the wind so the fern can reproduce—just like their prehistoric ancestors did over 200 million years ago.

The Monarch Fern is often an epiphyte—a plant that grows on other plants or trees for support rather than in soil. They climb other plants as they reach for sunlight
It is an adaptation that allows the fern to grow in a crowded tropical canopy!

Although it is called 'spkemoss' Selaginella isn't a true moss. It is a lycophyte and dates back over 400 million years.
These plants are small and creep along the damp ground or rocks, but their ancient relative tree-lycophytes grew over 100 feet tall and dominated the tropical forests
They rely entirely on releasing microscopic spores to reproduce and spread.