Getting Around
Things,
animate,
and inanimate,
get around around.
As far as inanimate goes,
there are diamonds.
Back in the day, folks panning for gold across North America, folks with no geological training whatsoever, found diamonds where no diamonds should be. That is to say that the local geology could not have produced the diamonds, for it was all sedimentary rock with no kimberlite pipes for hundreds of miles distant.* The existence of the diamonds was a fact, however, and the conundrum of their presence (on average one diamond for every square mile of surface area) was only resolved with imaginative thinking. The diamonds had come from the sedimentary rocks. They just happened to be deposited in the formative material accumulating that eventually would become the sedimentary rock. The diamonds also came with the material carried atop and in the glaciers that once covered substantial portions of North America. From the kimberlite pipes in Canada, diamonds were scattered across the plains.
As for distant dispersal of life forms,
the distance is overcome by the eventualities provided by time and circumstance.
Even molten islands pushed up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, that began their existence as sterile rock,
eventually,
by and by,
were inhabited by all sorts of life forms.
At present,
a rather larger lichen than any Cladonia, namely Lobaria pulmonaria, has a circum-global distribution.
And at a larger scale, the fern Pteridium has a global distribution, only recently being (with some adherent controversy) separated from Pteridium aquilinum in to somewhat more local species.
Lastly,
on the same scale as Cladonia,
a tiny moss has been studied,
and against the long-held belief of local distribution only,
was found to exist in North America as well as Europe. [Authors: Flagmeier, Maren, Draper, Isabel, Vigalondo, Beatriz, Garilleti, Ricardo, and Lara, Francisco, Source: The Bryologist, 124(3) : 403-413. (This was originally brought to my attention by Taro letaka, t_tallhouse. )]
So,
I keep an open mind when the traits of identification appear correct, but the occurrence would be an outlier of sorts.
- Excepting Murfreesboro, Arkansas famous for its Crater of Diamonds State Park.
