You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, but in fact moss people number in the hundreds and they feel very strongly about their subject. "Oh, yes," Ellis told me, "the meetings can get very lively at times."
I asked him for an example of controversy.
"Well, here's one inflicted on us by one of your countrymen," he said, smiling lightly, and opened a hefty reference work containing illustrations of mosses whose most notable characteristic to the uninstructed eye was their uncanny similarity one to another. "That," he said, tapping a moss, "used to be one genus, Drepanocladus. Now it's been reorganized into three: Drepanocladus, Wamstorfia, and Hamatacoulis."
"And did that lead to blows?" I asked perhaps a touch hopefully.
"Well, it made sense. It made perfect sense. But it meant a lot of reordering of collections and it put all the books out of date for a time, so there was a bit of, you know, grumbling."
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p.353
