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Stiff Clubmoss (Lycopodium annotinum L.) 

This is a fern “ally” and like ferns, produces spores.  It’s more primitive than ferns evolutionarily speaking and thus is one of the more primitive vascular plants extant.  The spores were collected (a tedious job if there ever was one) and used as a dry lubricant.  You may have run into it in high school physics when you rolled a ball down a plane to calculate acceleration.  Lycopodium “dust” or spores were used to lubricate the plane.  It was also used as a dry lubricant for prophylactics - no more since the creation of silicon lubricant. The common name clubmoss comes from the club-shapped spore bearing structure.

© Fred Searcy 2017