Yeah, my language is *at best* imprecise here, mostly in the interests of legibility and not dumping too much information in a sentence that was meant to direct your attention elsewhere. The technical term I was dancing around was “amniotes”, animals that develop an amniotic sac. Even that would have been wrong because it’s only concerned with vertebrate clades, which I wasn’t even thinking of at the time, so I appreciate you pointing that out and I’ve tweaked it slightly
(One brief correction, mosses and vascular ferns do indeed require standing water for reproduction- although they can take advantage of transient puddles and such when they have to. This limits them to low-lying areas, and it’s a primary reason that you don’t see fern forests around today the way you did back in the Carboniferous.)
Yeah, my language is *at best* imprecise here, mostly in the interests of legibility and not dumping too much information in a sentence that was meant to direct your attention elsewhere. The technical term I was dancing around was “amniotes”, animals that develop an amniotic sac. Even that would have been wrong because it’s only concerned with vertebrate clades, which I wasn’t even thinking of at the time, so I appreciate you pointing that out and I’ve tweaked it slightly
(One brief correction, mosses and vascular ferns do indeed require standing water for reproduction- although they can take advantage of transient puddles and such when they have to. This limits them to low-lying areas, and it’s a primary reason that you don’t see fern forests around today the way you did back in the Carboniferous.)