A 400-million-year-old plant creates water so weird it looks Alien
Researchers discovered that living horsetails act like natural distillation towers : producing bizarre oxygen isotope signatures more extreme than anything previously recorded on Earth—sometimes resembling meteorite water.
By tracing these isotopic shifts from the plant base to its tip, scientists unlocked a new way to decode ancient humidity and climate, using both modern plants and fossilized phytoliths that preserve isotopic clues for millions of years.