The real life pokemon-esque game of collecting pictures of all the angiosperm orders is surprisingly fun and as a 30-something year old guy, I personally find it more meaningful than, say, the pokemon game itself. As I make progress on that sidequest, I wonder what could possibly come next? It's obvious, right? Branch out to other areas of the tree of life. The next logical group would be one layer up the tree to the tracheophytes aka vascular plants, which includes the angiosperms, but then also extends out to include the gymnosperms, polypodiophyta (ferns), and lycopods (clubmosses, firmosses, spikemosses and quillworts).

There are approximately 1,070 species of Gymnosperms divided up into 12 families and 8 orders. Approximately 10,560 species of Ferns are known and categorized into 21 families and 11 orders. For Lycopods, there are 1,290 species and just 3 orders. All summarized in the following bar plot.

Personally, before starting this sidequest, I honestly had no idea some of these plants existed, let alone the fact that I have walked right by them thousands of times. So I hope the reader can learn something new as well. As before, we will keep score in a bar plot of encounters.

Gymnosperms

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Polypodiophyta

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Lycopods

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