I've been thinking about life after the ecological collapse. Many of the species we love will be extinct. But probably not liverworts. Liverworts were among the first plants to bounce back after the world-wide rain of molten quartz set all the forests on fire when an asteroid hit the Earth 65 million years ago. They were among the first to bounce back after the much worse end-Permian extinction. They've been around for 420 million years, but with bursts of new species beginning in the mid-Jurassic and continuing through the Cenozoic. Liverworts so deeply evolved that when you search the internet for info on them, half the articles you'll see are about how to *kill* them, because they're so fucking hard to kill! That's because a small piece of a liverwort can grow into a whole new plant. And some have little cup-shaped structures holding clusters of cells called gemmae. A gemma can be splashed out of one of these cups by falling raindrops, and if it lands in a suitable place it will grow into a new liverwort. It's as if flakes of your skin splashed off by rain could grow into new copies of you. They like damp, poorly lit places. I was delighted to find a bunch along the River Leith in Edinburgh - shown in my photo here. They were mixed with ferns and moss: two other ancient types of plant that propagate using spores. After global crises, we see "spore spikes" in the fossil record: plants like these become very common, setting the stage for new forests.