Plants

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 to a study published today (August 11) in Science. One fossils is 407 million years old and the other 397 million years old, give or take a few million. See also: Live birth in lizards developed earlier than thought

… 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 as Spirogyra.[ … ]

Dr Becker explained, “It seems that Zygnematales have lost oogamy and their ability to produce sperm and egg cells, and instead, possibly due to selection pressure in the absence of free water, use conjugation for reproduction. Investigation of such a large number of genes has shown that, despite their apparent simplicity, Zygnematales have genetic traces of other complex traits also associated with green land plants. Consequently Zygnematales true place as the closest living relative to land plants has been revealed.” Yes, but …  Read More ›

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, but no rush.) We seem to get better fossils all the time. Who says there’s no progress? This would make a great fabric print too.

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 and performance before flooding the environment with new, improved versions of themselves.  The issue: When does a grouping of plants with the same ancestor, called a clade, begin to spin off new species? Biologists have long assumed that rapid speciation occurred when a clade first developed a new physical trait or mechanism and had begun its own genetic branch. But the team, led by Brown Read More ›