I read with enthusiasm Richard Fortey's Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms (New York, 2012), a pop biology book which describes various plants and animals that originated millenia ago and that survive outwardly unchanged to the present day. It's a great subject and might have been a great book if Fortey had been less anecdotal and more informative, and if he not just blathered into the tape recorder but had paid attention to organization and prose style.
Ever since my summers at Makamah in the 1940s, I've had an affection for horseshoe crabs. They were abundant then, although scary and definitely not-to-be-stepped-on, and although I can't say for sure, I wouldn't be surprised to find that they are very rare now, especially in populated areas like the Sound. I would not have known that horseshoe crabs date from the pre-hemoglobin era and that their blood (or blood-equivalent) is based not on iron but on copper. I did not know anything about velvet worms or the various ancient slimes with which Fortey is so taken, but I am well-acquainted with horsetails, which, however primitive they may be, continue to thrive rather wonderfully around our West Bradford pond.
Of all Fortey's species, my favorite is unquestionably the welwitschia, or, as it is sometimes called, the tweeblaarkanniedood, or khurob, or nyanka, or onyango – a plant which is no less exotic than its various names.
It's the only plant in its order (although it can claim fossil relatives) and it hangs on in Namibia and Angola. It's a very distant relative of pines and spruces, having diverged in the late Permian. Welwitschia has an extremely odd growth habit. It makes only two true leaves in its lifetime, but the leaves, which might be imagined as very wide ribbons, grow constantly throughout the long life of the plant. The leaves can be fifteen feet long; the plant can live for a thousand and some think even two thousand years. Here's a welwitschia: it's not a classically handsome plant, not a garden beauty.
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