NHM: Cryptogamic Herbarium

I'm not that thrilled with this as HDR shots go, but am pleased because I did it without a tripod, and didn't really take enough photos (3)... It may not look very HDR, but the lighting was quite extreme: it took this when I first arrived in the herbarium this morning and it was actually very dark but for the lights in some of the bays and at the end of the central passage.

A cryptogam is a plant that reproduces using spores (i.e. not a seed-bearing plant). The Cryptogamic Herbarium is thus a herbarium full of specimens of plants that reproduce using spores: bryophytes (mosses), pteridophytes (ferns and their allies), and algae. Oh, and lichens are in there too, because, um, they contain a photosynthetic symbiont so are partially plant-ish, and, well, the herbarium is old... History apparently trumps taxonomic correctness. In truth, cryptogam is a pretty obsolete term these days (taxonomically) because the group it describes is a cladistically polyphyletic one: the cryptogams represent many diverse groups of organisms, not a clade of closely related ones (they are polyphyletic = of many races).

Oh well, it is an interesting place, so hey ho...