Making Eden by David Beerling, 2019. Oxford University Press. Almost 12 years ago I reviewed David Beerling’s previous book The Emerald Planet. I was very impressed with that slim, but information-packed, volume; I’m...
Now that’s an eye-catching headline, isn’t it? The thought of mushrooms and toadstools – that famously don’t produce oxygen, unlike green plants with their oxygenic photosynthesis – adding oxygen to the planet’s...
Sadly, we don’t have time machines that would permit us to go back and see ancient evolution in action. So we have to make do with such devices and stratagems as inference, surmise, speculation, good honest-to-goodness...
What happened 670 million years ago? Can’t remember? Doesn’t matter, that’s why we have palaeobotanists. Palaeobotanists that is whose science it seems has been much under-appreciated amidst the high expectations, hope...
For many years it has been the considered view that land plants had evolved some 500 million years ago from stonewort-like algae, something like the extant genus Chara. In a timely re-evaluation of this notion, Sabina...