omnybus:

Fun fact about me as a little kid: When I was about six years old, I used to live in Texas, and back then, I sincerely believed that tumbleweeds hatched from eggs.

My logic was thus: my family lived in the middle of practically nowhere, and I would see them rolling around a lot across the flatlands. I wondered how a plant could grow if it was rolling around all the time and didn’t have any leaves or flowers like other plants. But then I saw this nature documentary (NatGeo’s ”Really Wild Animals”) about coral reefs that described coral as “an animal that looks like a plant” . So I figured that tumbleweeds were a kind of “land coral”, I.E. a weird sort of animal that just looked like a dried-up shrub. From there I figured they laid eggs (purely on a guess). I imagined they were as big as soccer balls and had soft shells, like snake eggs. 

A couple years later I moved from Texas and learned that they were plants; they just grew like regular shrubs and would dry up and snap off at their base to roll around and spread seeds. Still, the idea of “land coral” stuck with me- any artists/writers out there, feel free to use this as inspiration.

I’ve heard worse conclusions.