Some 23,000 species of living mosses and liverworts have been identified. These are small, fairly simple, plants usually found in moist locations. Liverworts have a thin, leathery body that grows flat on moist soil or, in some cases, the surface of still water.
Mosses have an erect shoot bearing tiny leaflike structures arranged in spirals.
Neither mosses nor liverworts have any woody tissue so they never grow very large. They have neither xylem nor phloem for the transport of water and food through the plant. The leafy shoot of mosses is haploid and thus part of the gametophyte generation. In early spring, raindrops splash sperm from male to female plants. These swim down the canal in the archegonium to the chamber containing the egg.