The future is gonna be tree with crabs....

theres also a definition of a what a tree in the sense , its develops wood, many things are tree like, but not trees: such as palms(just overgrown herbs), dracaena( aka cabbage tree, they have something dracenoid thickining.) extinct plants like giant lycophytes and ferns

Its basically just the best way to be a large plant if you're not gonna be a big parasitic ivy. Once your plant circulatory system gets complex enough to send stuff further away, you start getting big enough that you need hard tissues just to stop yourself from folding over.

I wasn't ready for how weird this comment section turned out to be...

The genus Cornus is a huge middle finger to growth-form-based taxonomy. It contains dogwood trees and also bunchberry, an itty bitty herb that grows on the forest floor.

The first "trees" were also lycopods whose closest extant relatives are the club mosses, a name which gives you an idea of how big they get. All the coal in the world is from a period where plants figured out wood before decomposers learned how to break it down and is mainly the result of a bunch of lycopod trunks sinking into peat bugs and slowly getting compressed.

tbf isn't a tree just a plant but big? makes sense that any plant species can evolve into a tree just by getting bigger

Arborization !

Fish too

I thought crab-like animals were all actually pretty closely related to each other, i.e. all crab-like animals are arthropods, which is a less broad category (despite the incredibly huge amount of species in it) than 'all plants that can form a wooden trunk'. Any taxonomists here to confirm/deny?

Trees are like every other plant, ONLY MORE SO

So if you look at a tiny blade of grass and a gigantic tree its like looking at a Chihuahua and a brachiosaurus. And there are smaller things and bigger things in the aminal kingdum!

Heh, branch