UsefulCharts’ Evolutionary Tree of Life Gets Plant Sex Wrong — and Misplaces an Ancient Giant
Matt Baker has an impressive talent for making complicated history look simple. His YouTube channel, UsefulCharts, turns sprawling subjects into orderly diagrams, giving viewers the satisfaction of seeing an entire field of knowledge arranged before them.
Unfortunately, nature has not agreed to cooperate.
In Evolutionary Tree of Life: Episode 4 — Plants & Fungi, published on November 29, 2024, Baker explains how plants and fungi evolved, how their major groups relate, and what distinguishes familiar organisms. His account is accessible, mostly grounded in established biology, and occasionally wrong in ways that matter.
Ferns apparently reproduce asexually. Potatoes become part of a root system. Algae are confined to water. A major mushroom order receives a title it does not deserve. The early history of flowers is presented with more certainty than the evidence allows.
And then there is Prototaxites, an enormous prehistoric organism that Baker confidently introduces as a fungus. Research published in January 2026 now challenges that identification.
These are not reasons to reject evolutionary biology. They are reasons to question what happens when a visually persuasive explanation becomes more authoritative than the science behind it.
The Fern That Somehow Lost Its Sex Life
Baker introduces ferns by explaining that they reproduce through spores rather than seeds.
That distinction is correct.
Then comes the problem:
"Spores differ from seeds in that they are produced asexually."
There is a limited sense in which this is defensible: producing an individual fern spore does not itself require fertilization. But Baker uses the distinction to transition into sexual reproduction in seed plants, leaving viewers with a misleading picture of how ferns reproduce.
Ferns have a sexual life cycle.
The familiar leafy fern produces spores through meiosis, a process that reduces chromosome number and generates genetic variation. Those spores germinate into small organisms called gametophytes.
The gametophytes produce sperm and eggs. Under suitable conditions, sperm swim through water to reach an egg. Fertilization produces an embryo that develops into another recognizable fern.
The University of Auckland explains these stages explicitly, including the role of meiosis and fertilization. The American Fern Society provides the same account.
The overlooked detail is more interesting than Baker's simplified distinction.
Ferns alternate between two generations with different reproductive responsibilities. Their life cycle is not adequately explained by placing spores on one side of a sexual-versus-asexual divide and seeds on the other.
Seed plants also produce spores, although their reproductive structures and life cycles differ substantially from those of ferns.
Baker could have explained this without drowning viewers in terminology.
Instead, his explanation removes the very mechanism that makes fern reproduction evolutionarily interesting.
That is the danger of simplification: it can produce an explanation that is easier to remember precisely because it leaves out the essential biology.
The Potato Is Not a Root
Later, Baker addresses the familiar question of why potatoes and tomatoes belong to the same family despite looking so different.
He correctly identifies tomatoes as botanical fruits and potatoes as tubers.
Then he explains that tubers are part of the root system.
A potato is a modified underground stem, not a root.
North Carolina State University's botanical reference explains the distinction. Potato tubers possess nodes and buds, just like other stems. The familiar eyes on a potato are structures capable of developing into new shoots.
Roots do not possess equivalent stem nodes.
This is not an obscure technical disagreement.
It is why a piece of potato containing an eye can produce a new potato plant. The structure being planted is a stem adapted for underground storage.
Sweet potatoes provide an excellent comparison because their edible storage structures are modified roots rather than stem tubers.
A potato and a sweet potato may look functionally similar on a dinner plate, but botanically they represent different plant organs.
Baker had an opportunity to explain one of the more surprising facts about familiar food.
Instead, he repeated a common misconception while presenting an evolutionary explanation meant to resolve confusion.
An Entire World of Algae Disappears
Baker begins his account of photosynthesis with a broadly correct explanation of chloroplast evolution.
An ancient cyanobacterium entered into a lasting relationship with a larger cell. Over evolutionary time, this endosymbiotic relationship gave rise to the chloroplasts inherited by major groups of photosynthetic organisms.
But his explanation becomes increasingly compressed.
He introduces green, red, and brown algae as descendants of this evolutionary development and describes algae as organisms that live exclusively in water.
Neither statement adequately captures their diversity.
Algae Do Not Live Exclusively in Water
Some algae inhabit soils, rocks, tree bark, and other terrestrial surfaces.
Research into plant–microbe interactions documents green algae occupying precisely these environments. Their ability to tolerate drying and survive outside aquatic habitats is part of their evolutionary and ecological importance.
Baker's absolute statement excludes organisms that scientists already knew existed.
The correction matters because the history of photosynthetic life on land is not exclusively the history of conventional land plants.
Brown Algae Have a Different Evolutionary History
The deeper problem involves classification.
Green and red algae belong to Archaeplastida, the major evolutionary group associated with primary plastids inherited from the original cyanobacterial endosymbiosis.
Brown algae belong to a different lineage.
Their plastids have a more complicated evolutionary history involving additional endosymbiotic events, in which eukaryotic organisms acquired photosynthetic machinery through relationships involving other eukaryotes.
A 2024 scientific review by Zoltán Füssy and Miroslav Oborník explains these multiple pathways and distinguishes primary plastid evolution from the complex plastids acquired by other evolutionary groups.
Brown algal plastids ultimately trace their ancestry to photosynthetic bacteria, but not through the same simple direct lineage implied by Baker's presentation.
That distinction is central to the evolutionary story.
The history of photosynthesis is not just one organism acquiring a chloroplast and passing it down a tidy family tree.
Different organisms acquired photosynthetic capabilities through several evolutionary relationships.
For a series explicitly concerned with constructing the tree of life, those distinctions deserve more attention.
Flowers Did Not Arrive With a Neatly Settled Origin Story
Baker describes magnoliids as an ancient flowering-plant group and draws attention to the cone-like appearance of Peperomia flowers.
He uses their appearance to evoke an early period when flowers were evolving from cones.
There is a scientific basis for examining relationships between the reproductive structures of ancient seed plants and modern flowers.
What is missing is the uncertainty.
The evolutionary origin of flowers remains a substantial research problem.
Scientists have proposed different models involving ancestral reproductive structures, changes in the arrangement of reproductive organs, and modifications to genetic programs controlling their development.
A 2016 review in Genetics examined competing explanations and emphasized that important steps in flower evolution remain unresolved.
Nor are magnoliids the earliest surviving branch of flowering plants.
Molecular research identifies Amborella among the earliest-diverging living flowering-plant lineages, followed by groups including water lilies and Austrobaileyales.
These relationships were established through genetic analysis long before Baker's video appeared.
A cone-like floral structure therefore cannot be treated as a straightforward window into the original flower.
Appearance alone does not establish ancestry.
Baker also associates much of eudicot diversity with evolution after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
There is an important distinction here.
Many living plant species diversified relatively recently. That does not mean their evolutionary groups originated recently.
Eudicots existed long before the dinosaur extinction approximately 66 million years ago.
Fossil pollen characteristic of eudicots dates to roughly 125 million years ago, while research documents substantial flowering-plant diversification during the Cretaceous.
Baker's wording about the later evolution of many eudicot species is not necessarily false.
But his presentation does little to separate the origin of a lineage from the subsequent diversification of its descendants.
That distinction becomes essential when explaining evolutionary time.
A group can be ancient even when most of its living members are comparatively young.
The Largest Mushroom Order Is Not the One Baker Names
The fungal portion of the episode contains another straightforward classification problem.
Baker identifies Polyporales as the largest mushroom order and associates the group with shelf fungi growing on trees.
Polyporales is certainly important.
But Agaricales is substantially more species-rich.
A taxonomic review published in 2024 described Agaricales as containing more than 40,000 allocated species, while a 2022 analysis of France's national fungal database recorded 4,423 Agaricales taxa compared with 513 Polyporales taxa.
Those figures use different taxonomic and geographic scopes, but neither supports Baker's ranking.
A broader 2026 database likewise identifies Agaricales as the most species-rich order of macrofungi, followed by Polyporales.
There is a second complication.
Not every fungus forming shelf-like structures belongs to Polyporales. Similar fruiting forms occur across multiple fungal orders.
The difference between appearance and evolutionary relationship matters here just as it does among flowering plants.
Different fungal lineages can independently develop comparable structures.
This is precisely why taxonomists increasingly rely on genetic relationships rather than grouping organisms merely because they look alike.
For a video teaching evolutionary classification, assigning the wrong superlative to an order is an avoidable mistake.
It is especially awkward because Baker subsequently introduces Agaricales through familiar examples, including button mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms, and deadly poisonous species.
The more diverse order was already sitting in his own explanation.
The Prehistoric Giant That May Never Have Been a Fungus
Near the end of the episode, Baker introduces Prototaxites.
He describes it as a giant prehistoric fungus, potentially reaching the height of a three-story building, and places it within his discussion of Ascomycota.
It is a memorable image.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, enormous column-like organisms towered above the relatively small vegetation of early terrestrial ecosystems.
But the identity of Prototaxites has been debated for generations.
And in January 2026, researchers published evidence that makes Baker's confident classification much harder to maintain.
A study in Science Advances, led by Corentin Loron and colleagues, examined fossils of Prototaxites taiti from Scotland's approximately 407-million-year-old Rhynie chert.
The researchers compared the fossils' microscopic structures and chemical composition with those of known fungi.
They found important differences.
The fossil material lacked convincing evidence of the chemical characteristics expected from fungal cell walls. Its structural organization also differed from that of known fungal groups.
The researchers concluded that the evidence did not support placing the organism within established fungal lineages.
Instead, they proposed that Prototaxites may represent an entirely extinct lineage of complex eukaryotic organisms.
That is an extraordinary possibility.
An organism once confidently introduced as a giant fungus might belong to a branch of life without a surviving equivalent.
The study does not conclusively resolve the identity of every fossil assigned to Prototaxites. Its detailed investigation centered on P. taiti, and further evidence could refine the classification.
But it provides a serious scientific challenge to treating the organism's fungal identity as established.
There is also an important chronological qualification.
Baker published his episode in November 2024, more than a year before the peer-reviewed study appeared.
It would be unfair to accuse him of ignoring research that had not yet been published.
The stronger criticism concerns the certainty of the original presentation.
The identity of Prototaxites was already disputed. An educational account could have described it as a probable fungus under one prominent interpretation while acknowledging alternatives.
That would have been accurate when Baker recorded the episode.
It would also have aged considerably better.
The new evidence makes Prototaxites the most compelling example of why an evolutionary tree must leave room for unresolved branches.
The Relationship Between Plants and Fungi That Deserved More Attention
Baker organizes the episode around plants and fungi as separate evolutionary kingdoms.
His explanation of fungi emphasizes decomposition.
Fungi break down organic material, absorb nutrients, cause infections, and sometimes provide useful substances such as antibiotics.
These are legitimate subjects.
But there is another relationship between plants and fungi that arguably deserves a central role in any account of their evolutionary history.
Fungi helped make terrestrial plant life possible.
Many fungi form mycorrhizal associations with plants, exchanging nutrients obtained from soil for sugars produced through photosynthesis.
These partnerships are widespread in living terrestrial ecosystems.
They also have an ancient history.
A 2014 investigation published in New Phytologist examined exceptionally preserved early land plants from the Rhynie chert.
Researchers identified two different kinds of fungi associated with the approximately 407-million-year-old plant Horneophyton lignieri.
Their findings revealed more complex early plant–fungus relationships than previously recognized.
The significance extends beyond one fossil.
The first plants colonizing land confronted difficult conditions, including limited soil development and the challenge of obtaining minerals.
Fungal partnerships are considered important adaptations in that transition.
Research published in 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified conserved molecular machinery associated with arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, supporting its deep evolutionary importance.
This is a remarkable story of cooperation between unrelated organisms.
The relationship also connects the two subjects of Baker's episode more directly than a conventional classification chart can.
Plants provide carbon compounds. Fungi help obtain nutrients. Together, they helped establish the biological systems that support terrestrial ecosystems.
Baker mentions lichens, which themselves involve important symbiotic relationships.
But the broader role of fungi in the evolution of land plants receives little attention.
That omission is not a factual error.
It is a missed opportunity to tell a stronger evolutionary story.
The Problem With Making Science Look Finished
Matt Baker gets plenty right.
His explanations of vascular tissues, the distinction between gymnosperms and angiosperms, the difference between monocots and eudicots, and the evolutionary relationship between fungi and animals convey genuine scientific knowledge.
There is no evidence in the material examined that he deliberately misrepresented biology or sought to deceive viewers.
Nor does the available evidence establish any improper influence from the commercial charts promoted alongside the series.
But scientific accuracy is not measured by whether a creator means well.
It is measured by what the audience is taught.
And the mistakes in this episode are not all equally trivial.
Calling a potato a root is a correctable botanical error.
Describing fern spores as asexual without explaining the sexual generation gives viewers an incomplete understanding of reproduction.
Compressing the complicated origins of algae and flowers into tidy evolutionary stories risks teaching relationships that are more certain or straightforward than the evidence permits.
Calling Prototaxites a fungus without qualification demonstrates the vulnerability of presenting unresolved scientific questions as settled facts.
These failures share a common weakness.
The evolutionary chart looks more definite than the evolutionary evidence sometimes allows.
A chart is an excellent way to communicate established relationships.
It is a much less reliable substitute for explaining why scientists accept those relationships, what evidence might overturn them, and which questions remain open.
That distinction is not a minor academic concern.
Evolutionary biology advances because scientists keep testing classifications against new fossils, genetic evidence, and competing explanations.
The 2026 Prototaxites research is a useful example of that process working as intended.
An ancient organism was placed within a familiar group. Researchers examined the evidence more closely. A different explanation emerged.
The scientific achievement is not that the original classification can never change.
It is that the classification can change when the evidence demands it.
Baker's episode teaches viewers how to read an evolutionary tree.
What it does not consistently teach them is when to question one.
And that may be the most important lesson of all.
References
1. Original video — Evolutionary Tree of Life | Episode 4 — Plants & Fungi
UsefulCharts / Matt Baker, November 29, 2024.
Primary work examined; establishes Baker's explanations, classifications, and statements challenged in this article. The supplied transcript was used to check his wording.
2. The Secret Life of Ferns
University of Auckland, NZ Plants, undated educational resource.
Explains fern meiosis, gametophytes, fertilization, and the alternation of generations omitted from Baker's simplified account.
3. About Ferns
American Fern Society, undated.
Independently confirms that fern spores develop into gametophytes capable of sexual reproduction.
4. Evolution of Seed Plants
OpenStax, Biology, 2016.
Establishes that seed plants also produce spores and explains how their reproductive cycles differ from those of seedless plants.
5. Extension Gardener Handbook: Botany
North Carolina State University Extension, undated online edition.
Identifies potatoes as modified underground stems and explains the botanical significance of their buds and nodes.
6. Plant–Microbe Interactions That Have Impacted Plant Terrestrializations
Scientific review, 2022.
Documents algae occupying terrestrial environments, contradicting the claim that algae live exclusively in water.
7. Complex Endosymbioses I: From Primary to Complex Plastids, Serial Endosymbiotic Events
Zoltán Füssy and Miroslav Oborník, Methods in Molecular Biology, 2024.
Distinguishes primary chloroplast origins from subsequent endosymbiotic events responsible for complex plastids in other algal lineages.
8. Evolving Ideas on the Origin and Evolution of Flowers: New Perspectives in the Genomic Era
Chanderbali and colleagues, Genetics, 2016.
Examines competing explanations for flower evolution and establishes that important details of floral origins remain unresolved.
9. Multigene Analyses Identify the Three Earliest Lineages of Extant Flowering Plants
Scientific research article, 1999.
Identifies early-diverging flowering-plant lineages, including Amborella, challenging an overly simple treatment of magnoliids as the earliest flowering plants.
10. Fossil Evidence for a Herbaceous Diversification of Early Eudicot Angiosperms During the Early Cretaceous
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2015.
Documents eudicot pollen from approximately 125 million years ago, establishing that the lineage predates the dinosaur extinction.
11. Phylogenetic and Taxonomic Updates of Agaricales, With an Emphasis on Tricholomopsis
Scientific taxonomic study, 2024.
Documents the extensive diversity of Agaricales, contradicting the identification of Polyporales as the largest mushroom order.
12. Unravelling the French National Fungal Database: Geography, Temporality, Taxonomy and Ecology of the Recorded Diversity
Journal of Fungi, 2022.
Provides an independent fungal-diversity comparison in which Agaricales substantially exceeds Polyporales in recorded taxa; its figures concern France rather than global diversity.
13. Prototaxites Fossils Are Structurally and Chemically Distinct From Extinct and Extant Fungi
Corentin C. Loron and colleagues, Science Advances, January 21, 2026.
Presents fossil and chemical evidence challenging the fungal identity of Prototaxites taiti and proposes an extinct evolutionary lineage. The findings do not independently establish the identity of every species assigned to the genus.
14. Fungal Associations in Horneophyton lignieri From the Rhynie Chert
Christine Strullu-Derrien and colleagues, New Phytologist, April 22, 2014.
Documents distinct fungal associations in an approximately 407-million-year-old plant, demonstrating the antiquity and complexity of plant–fungus relationships.
15. The Receptor-Like Kinase ARK Controls Symbiotic Balance Across Land Plants
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2024.
Identifies conserved molecular mechanisms involved in arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, strengthening the evidence for its evolutionary importance.