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You may use this photograph for educational, non-commercial purposes. Credit "Todd Marsee, Michigan Sea Grant"
You may use this photograph for educational, non-commercial purposes. Credit "Todd Marsee, Michigan Sea Grant"
Equisetum (horsetail, snake grass, puzzlegrass) is the only living genus in Equisetaceae, a family of vascular plants that reproduce by spores rather than seeds.
Equisetum is a "living fossil" as it is the only living genus of the entire class Equisetopsida, which for over one hundred million years was much more diverse and dominated the understory of late Paleozoic forests. Some Equisetopsida were large trees reaching to 30 meters tall. The genus Calamites of the family Calamitaceae, for example, is abundant in coal deposits from the Carboniferous period.
A superficially similar but entirely unrelated flowering plant genus, mare's tail (Hippuris), is occasionally referred to as "horsetail", and adding to confusion, the name mare's tail is sometimes applied to Equisetum.
It has been suggested that the pattern of spacing of nodes in horsetails, wherein those toward the apex of the shoot are increasingly close together, inspired John Napier to discover logarithms.
Photographed on the shore of Lake Huron, near Cheboygan, Michigan.
It wasn't until I got near Blind River, Ontario, that it became easy to see a large part of Lake Huron. The Georgian Bay (eastern part of the lake), has a very rocky and fissured coastline with deep bays that have no connecting roads between them. While I could drive an hour or more out a penninsula to get a glimpse of the lake, there was no way to drive along the coastline.