Mosses are quite common and can readily be found in our gardens, streets, parks and woodlands, Liverworts don't seem to be so common and you need to look for them. They are members of a Plant Division called Bryophytes which followed the Algae in the colonisation of the land by plants, unlike algae they have no representatives living in the sea, they were the first fully terrestrial plants. The photograph on the left was taken on the Bowenia Walk at Waterpark Creek National Park.

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For a long time taxonomists considered fungi to be members of the Plant Kingdom. This early classification was based mainly on similarities in lifestyle: both fungi and plant are mainly sessile, have similarities in general morphology and growth habitat (like plants, fungi often grow in soil, in the case of mushrooms forming conspicuous fruiting bodies, which sometimes bear resemblance to plants such as mosses). Moreover, both groups possess a cell wall, which is absent in the Animal Kingdom. However, the fungi are now considered a separate kingdom, distinct from both plants and animals, from which they appear to have diverged approximately one billion years ago. Many studies have identified several distinct morphological, biochemical, and genetic features in the Fungi, clearly delineating this group from the other kingdoms. For these reasons, the fungi are placed in their own kingdom.

Lichens are composite organisms consisting of a symbiotic association of a fungus (the mycobiont) with a photosynthetic partner (the photobiont or phycobiont), usually either a green alga or cyanobacterium. The morphology, physiology and biochemistry of lichens are very different to that of the isolated fungus and alga in culture. Lichens occur in some of the most extreme environments on Earth—arctic tundra, hot deserts, rain forests, rocky coasts and toxic slag heaps.

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