 Hi, guys. Imagine meeting you here at this hour to talk about plants and fungi. Seriously, can life get any cooler than this? Before we start talking about plant characteristics or fungi characteristics, because those fungi are some fun guys, I want to draw our cladogram where we stand, what we know already, and this actually is going to be review. We know that we have a common ancestor that came about, oh, you know, a chunk of change ago, like what, 3.6 billion years ago? Is that all? And that ancestor, that first prokaryotic cell, gave rise split off and gave rise to a branch of critters that today we know of as bacteria. These are prokaryotes. They're well known to all of us. But there was another branch that during some sort of speciation event, this branch got histone proteins. And everyone beyond this point got those histone proteins. And that branch, that ancestor that had histone proteins, gave rise to the archaeans. And remember, archaeans are prokaryotes, but they have some different characteristics than bacteria in particular, histone proteins. They're the ones that live in those super intense, crazy environments. Now, the ancestor with the histone proteins, they gave rise to the archaeans, also gave rise to a group of eukaryotes. And everything beyond here is a eukaryote. Let's just make it easy and say everything beyond has a nucleus. Now, the ancestor of all eukaryotes makes sense, is going to branch off and give rise to some other things. Now, we talked about how protists are single celled eukaryotes and that there are protists interspersed. There are sister protist groups to all of our main classes of eukaryotes. And one of the sister protist groups is algae. And algae is the sister protist group to land plants. Actually, yeah, let's call them land plants. I was about to say, actually, they're green plants, but green plants include algae. So this group right here, that group is the green plants. And this is a group that we're going to talk about today. We're going to look at some of their characteristics and we're actually going to branch out these guys right here. We're going to look in more detail at the land plant tree. But before we go into that, we're going to find ourselves of where the algae or where the animals and fungi come into this mix. So remember that we have... His turn probably got the nucleus. Okay, so the next thing we got was chitin. So this ancestor had made use of the biomolecule chitin and that ancestor gave rise to the fungi group. And remember the sister group to fungi were slime molds. Those were those awesome things that were colonial. They were single-celled critters, but they decided at times to be colonial and awesome. So we're going to talk about fungi today as well. Just so we have some perspective, I want you to remember that we're also going to talk about animals. And the animals are joined by these signaling proteins and they're joined to another protist group called the coanoflagellates. And I'm just going to write coan... and you're going to write o-flagellates. And then we also have the animals. And all animals are joined by the pleasant... the pleasant of a pleasant blastula. Now let's see here. What else can we add? I think what we can do next, and we're just going to do it because I can't help it, I want to talk about actually, I think what we'll do is we'll break down the land plants when we get into our specific groups. If you look at our outline, what we're going to do first is we're going to talk about the removal of a plant because it is different and kind of bizarre and cool, which is of course why we have to talk about it, then what we're more familiar with. Then we're going to break down different kinds of land plants. We're actually going to look at four different flavors of land plants and we're going to look at how they're related to each other and we're going to flesh out this part of the cladogram. And then we're going to take a look at our friends, the fungi and learn some cool facts about them and look at some important fungi in our lives because there are lots of them. So let's start out with the life cycle and I'll be right back and we'll do that.