W.-E. Loennig: Matzke still doesn’t seem to have carefully studied my extensive paper yet, but he is still complaining that others know nothing on that topic and keeps on talking some nonsense promoting some half-baked ideas.
Plants
Carnivorous plants: After eating Darwin, they couldn’t resist further culinary adventures
Can you blame them? He was delicious and it was fun.
Wood ten million years older than thought?
In “Oldest Known Wood” (The Scientist , August 11, 2011) Jef Akst reports that “Two newly described fossils suggest that wood is some 10 million years older than previous believed” (No kidding!): … two relatively small fossils provide new clues, and suggest that wood evolved at least 10 million years earlier than previously documented, according Read More…
Why call it a phylogenetic tree … ?
… when it gets uprooted this often? From ScienceDaily (“Ancestors of Land Plants Revealed”, May 2, 2011), It was previously thought that land plants evolved from stonewort-like algae. However, new research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology shows that the closest relatives to land plants are actually conjugating green algae such Read More…
No, NOT coffee!! A soothing tea at this time of night …
See this beautiful image of a flowering plant from the Cretaceous era. It killed the dinosaurs? … Mmmm … probably not. I spent some time thinking how to arrange these branches in a vase, had they survived, and then decided, no: Outdoor container gardening, overwinter in cool greenhouse. May need support. (= Will need support, Read More…
Is this evidence for design in plants?
At ScienceDaily (March 30, 2011), we learn that “Like Products, Plants Wait for Optimal Configuration Before Market Success”: Just as a company creates new, better versions of a product to increase market share and pad its bottom line, an international team of researchers led by Brown University has found that plants tinker with their design Read More…