I shall learn from this post how to disagree respectfully on the internet. Hats off.

There must be a Latin name for “plant-like” that could have been used. Maybe “anomalous herbiform entity”. But, I’m poor at crosswords.

And then there are those of us who just prefer plain English. Using Latin in a publication aimed at laypeople sounds pretentious.

This reminds me of when I heard the phrase "lenticular cloud". I looked it up, hoping to learn something about how these clouds are formed, etc. It simply means "shaped like a lentil".

Perhaps this is autocorrect gone awry, but it has nothing to do with lentils.

Not a meteorologist, but from all I understand it means lens-shaped, and to me that immediately gives a strong clue as to how they form since lenses have focal points and can, to some degree, have shapes expressed as formulae about some origin. Which to me is suggestive of the relation to the mountains around which they form.

"Lentil" is itself a reference to its lens-like shape, same as the cloud. "Lenticular" has nothing in it suggestive of legumes.

Yeah! I submitted this awhile back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30117500

Looks more like a coral.

I agree, I often forget that corals are not plants(but they look like plants, which probably means that the Mars rock that look like a coral also looks like a plant).

And they act like plants: they photosynthesize; they are sessile; and they are structured as a thin layer of living tissue over a dead, rigid internal support.

I could see that, or a sea sponge[1]

1: https://study.com/academy/lesson/sea-sponge-lesson-for-kids....

Saying plant vs crystal makes it more click bait.

I think he got offended because he understood "plant-like" in a functional sense (e.g. that it uses photosynthesis), maybe "plant-shaped" would be more accurate.

Reminds me of coral.