About this episode

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the evolution of trees and their impact on the planet.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the earliest evidence we have of the existence of trees and how even plants we might have on windowsills or as vegetables in gardens can and do, in the right conditions, evolve into trees. Since their emergence around 400 million years ago after low lying plants started to develop stronger stems and grow taller and more upright, trees have transformed our planet, so creating ecosystems, altering the atmosphere and setting the stage for the world as we know it today. With Jenny McElwain 1711 Chair of Botany at Trinity College Dublin and Director of Trinity Botanic Gardens Christopher Berry Senior Lecturer in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Cardiff University And Bill Baker Senior Researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Produced by Conor Garrett Reading list: David Beerling: The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History (Oxford University Press, 2008) C.M. Berry, ‘Palaeobotany: The Rise of the Earth’s Early Forests’ (Current Biology 29, 2019) Christopher M. Berry and John E.A. Marshall, ‘Lycopsid forests in the early Late Devonian paleoequatorial zone of Svalbard’ (Geology 43:12, 2015) N.S. Davies, W.J. McMahon and C.M. Berry…

People in this episode

Host: Misha Glenny

Guests: Jenny McElwain, Christopher Berry, Bill Baker

Topics covered

• evolution of trees
• botany
• ecosystems
• plant evolution
• paleobotany

Keywords

• trees
• evolution
• ecosystems
• botany
• paleobotany
• plant evolution
• environment

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Trinity College Dublin, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Cardiff University

Books & works: The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History, Palaeobotany: The Rise of the Earth’s Early Forests, Lycopsid forests in the early Late Devonian paleoequatorial zone of Svalbard, Earth’s earliest forest: fossilized trees and vegetation-induced sedimentary structures from the Middle Devonian

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