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Buxbaumia
Also called Humpbacked Elves
Buxbaumia (bug moss, bug-on-a-stick, humpbacked elves, or elf-cap moss) is a genus of twelve species of moss (Bryophyta). It was first named in 1742 by Albrecht von Haller and later brought into modern botanical nomenclature in 1801 by Johann Hedwig to commemorate Johann Christian Buxbaum, a German physician and botanist who discovered the moss in 1712 at the mouth of the Volga River. The moss is microscopic for most of its existence, and plants are noticeable only after they begin to produce their reproductive structures. The asymmetrical spore capsule has a distinctive shape and structure, some features of which appear to be transitional from those in primitive mosses to most modern mosses.
Species of Buxbaumia may be found across much of the temperate to subarctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere, as well as cooler regions of Australia and New Zealand.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Buxbaumia by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
